reat common chord, his harmony of producers, soldiers and
philosophers, would still have been droning monotonously down the ages,
wherever men were assembled to dwell together. Doubtless the concord
he conceived was beautiful. But the dissonances he would have
silenced, but which, with ever-augmenting force, peal and crash, from
his day to ours, through the echoing vault of time, embody, as I am apt
to think, a harmony more august than any which even he was able to
imagine, and in their intricate succession weave the plan of a
world-symphony too high to be apprehended save in part by our grosser
sense, but perceived with delight by the pure intelligence of immortal
spirits. It is indeed the fundamental defect of all imaginary
polities--and how much more of such as fossilize, without even
idealizing, the actual!--that even though they be perfect, their
perfection is relative only to a single set of conditions; and that
could they perpetuate themselves they would also perpetuate these,
which should have been but brief and transitory phases in the history
of the race. Had it been possible for Plato to establish over the
habitable globe his golden chain of philosophic cities, he would have
riveted upon the world for ever the institutions of slavery and caste,
would have sealed at the source the springs of science and invention,
and imprisoned in perennial impotence that mighty genius of empire
which alone has been able to co-ordinate to a common and beneficent end
the stubborn and rebellious members of this growing creature Man. And
if the imagination of a Plato, permitted to work its will, would thus
have sterilized the germs of progress, what shall we say of such men as
ourselves imposing on the fecundity of nature the limits and rules of
our imperfect mensuration! Rather should we, in humility, submit
ourselves to her guidance, and so adapt our institutions that they
shall hamper as little as may be the movements and forces operating
within them. For it is by conflict, as we have now learnt, that the
higher emerges from the lower, and nature herself, it would almost
seem, does not direct but looks on, as her world emerges in painful
toil from chaos. We do not find her with precipitate zeal intervening
to arrest at a given point the ferment of creation; stretching her hand
when she sees the gleam of the halcyon or the rose to bid the process
cease that would destroy them; and sacrificing to the completeness of
thos