his own and other people's mouths shut and
hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more
grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your
Imperator, and have peace, and decent government; and you have,
wittingly or not, started up old bugbear Monarchy again; and
things go well for a time. But, bless you, you have not found
the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be
discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to
do with forms of government. So you go in search once more for a
political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing
thing, the detritus,--your karma;--and away you go squirreling
round the changes again; and all this you call political
evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in
his cage;--whereas if you found Tao,--if you lived balancedly,--
if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,--
there would be no political evolution at all--no squirreling,--
but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap
about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of
freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility,
simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than
we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little
more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus
as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping
the channels open.--At least, I imagine so.

Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus' day, the detritus
had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity
amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and
had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself,
where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had
gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer;
had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with
the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be
kneeled to, addressed as _Dominus,_ and so forth:--all outward
expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment
which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by
retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not
by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone,
nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress,
self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone;
but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who