ill guided by his old maxims, and is the slave
of his inveterate party prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs of the
times; instead of looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and
forgets nothing; with 'wise saws and modern instances' he would stem the
rising tide of revolution. He lives more and more within the circle of
his own party, as the world without him becomes stronger. This seems to
be the reason why the old order of things makes so poor a figure
when confronted with the new, why churches can never reform, why most
political changes are made blindly and convulsively. The great crises
in the history of nations have often been met by an ecclesiastical
positiveness, and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which
have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary
statesman may be compared to madness; they grow upon him, and he becomes
possessed by them; no judgement of others is ever admitted by him to be
weighed in the balance against his own.

(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have been
a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and fails
to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He thinks that to be most of a
state which is most like one man, and in which the citizens have the
greatest uniformity of character. He does not see that the analogy is
partly fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation
is really the balance or rather the surplus of individual wills, which
are limited by the condition of having to act in common. The movement
of a body of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a single man;
the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes still
more straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of action and
feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they are diffused
through a community; whence arises the often discussed question, 'Can a
nation, like an individual, have a conscience?' We hesitate to say
that the characters of nations are nothing more than the sum of the
characters of the individuals who compose them; because there may be
tendencies in individuals which react upon one another. A whole nation
may be wiser than any one man in it; or may be animated by some common
opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected the mind of
a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of genius to
perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to hav