ld comrade, with strong
reproaches toward the Ithacans for permitting the wrong to his house.
It is intimated that they could prevent it if they chose; but they are
evidently deaf to this appeal to their gratitude and affection for
their chieftain.

Leiocrates, the third Suitor, responds in a speech which is the
culmination of insolence and defiance of right. The Suitors would slay
Ulysses himself, should he now appear and undertake to put them out of
his palace. He dares not come and claim his own! Right or wrong we are
going to stay, and, if necessary, kill the owner. It is the most open
and complete expression of the spirit of the Suitors, they are a lot of
brigands, who must be swept away, if there be any order in the world.
Leiocrates dissolves the Assembly, a thing which he evidently had no
right to do; the people tamely obey, the institutional spirit is not
strong enough to resist the man of violence. Let them scatter; they are
a rotten flock of sheep at any rate.

Here the first part of the Book concludes. The three sets of speakers
have given their views, one on each side; each set has represented a
certain phase of the question; thus we have heard the institutional,
religious and personal phases. In such manner the sweep of the conduct
of the Suitors is fully brought out; they are destroying State and
Family, are defying the Gods, and are ready to slay the individual who
may stand in their way. Certainly their harvest is ripe for the sickle
of divine justice, upon whose deep foundation this poem reposes.

The Assembly of the People now vanishes quite out of sight, it has
indeed no valid ground of being. The young men seem to be the chief
speakers, and show violent opposition, while the old men hold back, or
manifest open sympathy with the House of Ulysses. The youth of Ithaca
have had their heads turned by the brilliant prize, and rush forward
forgetful of the penalty. It is indeed a time of moral loosening, of
which this poem gives the source, progress, and cure. Telemachus,
however, rises out of the mass of young men, the future hero who is to
assert the law of the Gods. In such manner we are to reach down to the
fact that the spirit of the Odyssey is ethical in the deepest sense,
and reveals unto men the divine order of the world.

II.

We now pass to the second part of the book, which shows Telemachus
accomplishing with the aid of the deity what human institutions failed
to do. If the Assembly will