held out to us, two influences
from which ancient Greek thought seems to have been strangely free. For
the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of the great men whom they
worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural powers;
while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic in
its character, aiming at culture and not utility, at higher spirituality
and more intense reverence for law, rather than at the increased
facilities of locomotion and the cheap production of common things about
which our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and
perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the 'plague spot of all Greek
states,' as one of their own writers has called it, was the terrible
insecurity to life and property which resulted from the factions and
revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all times, raising a
spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in the middle ages of
Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how it was
that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek political theorists
were, yet, their end once attained, no modern conservatives raised such
outcry against the slightest innovation. Even acknowledged improvements
in such things as the games of children or the modes of music were
regarded by them with feelings of extreme apprehension as the herald of
the drapeau rouge of reform. And secondly, it will show us how it was
that Polybius found his ideal in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle,
like Mr. Bright, in the middle classes. Polybius, however, is not
content merely with pointing out his ideal state, but enters at
considerable length into the question of those general laws whose
consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are fated to
decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that 'as iron produces
rust and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it, so every state has
in it the seeds of its own corruption.' He is not, however, content to
rest there, but proceeds to deal with the more immediate causes of
revolutions, which he says are twofold in nature, either external or
internal. Now, the former, depending as they do on the synchronous
conjunction of other events outside the sphere of scientific estimation,
are from their very character incalculable; but the latter, though
assuming many forms, always re