tocracy, but, more properly, a representative Democracy, slides by fatal necessity, first into Timocracy, then into Oligarchy, next into Ochlocracy, (confounded with Democracy by the ancients,) and lastly, into Tyranny. Aristotle had treated this part of the subject with his usual clearness and method, in some respects improving upon his master's notions. He reckons three legitimate forms of government-Aristocracy, Democracy, and Monarchy; and observes, that the first degenerates, when perverted, into Oligarchy, the second into Ochlocracy, or mob-government, the third into Tyranny, a kind of political institution, with which modern nations are well acquainted.

Plato pursues his parallel between the individual citizen and the state, and shows how perversion is effected in each. In the first place, while reason and counsel maintain their authority in the mind, the passions are held in due restraint, and virtue bears sway; but the legitimate governing power removed, the lusts and impetuous desires of our nature assume the superiority, and vice succeeds to virtue. Precisely so happens it in states. Strife and anger beget ambition, of all vices the nearest akin to virtue. And this is the animating principle of Timocracies, such as those of Crete and Sparta, which may be regarded as occupying the next place in excellence to Plato's Republic; at least they were so regarded by the philosopher himself. The progress of corruption continuing, and cupidity and other vices abounding, an Oligarchy springs up, in which sordid lucre, selfish.

ness, and the base worship of property, actuate both rulers and people. In this vilest of all governments, virtue ceases to exercise the slightest influence; words lose their original signification; a good man" no longer signifies a man possessing high moral qualities, but a person who has large means; the qualification of a senator is not virtue, or honour, or capacity, or wisdom, but a certain census in land or moveables; privileged castes rise above the heads of their fellow-citizens, render themselves hereditary, and monopolize the functions of government, of religion, of the army; learning is despised, genius is trampled under foot, the arts dwindle into instruments of luxury; women grow depraved, children disobedient. The people at length are goaded into revolution. They are ignorant, and incapable of self-government. An Ochlocracy, or mob-rule, is tried; but the very vitality of the nation having been almost drained out by the Oligarchy, after many fruitless attempts at building up a palace with sand, they grow weary of fruitless exertion, and apathy succeeds, during which some daring man starts up, seizes the unlucky moment, and establishes a Tyranny, which Plato looks upon as the worst depravation of government.

Tyranny, however, is not so much a form of government, as political death, or sleep, during which all conscious exertion of power is extinguished. The people, like a vast mass of brute matter, are fashioned by their tyrant into whatever form he pleases he sends jugglers among them, under the

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name of priests, who fill them with dreams favourable to tyranny; by the instrumentality of these men, he darkens their minds, stupifies them with intellectual mandragora, and gradually plucks up by the root every free and manly and noble sentiment; ultimately, with more than Circæan art, he transforms them into hogs, rings their noses, and turns them to grunt, feed, and fatten for his use in the sty of slavery. Plato proceeds no further in this fatal circle. History, in fact, afforded him no light, exhibited to him no people, who, after ages of degradation and misery, rose again, wreaked fearful vengeance on their hereditary oppressors, repaid back with interest in a day their wrongs and the wrongs of their forefathers, shook their puny tyrants into their original nothingness, and placed themselves once more on the level of man, and made well-conceived advances towards perfect freedom. This Plato had not seen, though we have, and even now see: but this is a digression from the Platonic theory.

The philosopher had enjoyed too many opportunities of instructing himself in the school of experience, to believe that any commonwealth, however wisely constituted, can be placed beyond the reach of time and change. He knew that his Republic, like the glorious one in which he was born, and whose excellence he did not sufficiently prize, must yield at length, with every other work of man, to dissolution; but this by no means justifies men, in his opinion,

"Conf. Stallbaum. i. 38. De Repub. viii. p. 543–580 a.

for relaxing their endeavours to stave off the assaults of decay. He did not think that men should hasten to perish in youth, because old age and death will overtake them inevitably at some distant day, let them act in the meantime as they please. On the contrary, he is careful to point out the means, which he fondly conceived to be in their power, of preserving the health of the state; that is to say, perpetual concord and union among the citizens. But the question still recurs, how are concord and union to be generated and maintained? In the answer to this consists the chief merit of Plato's system. He grounds everything on the notions of moderation, unmeddling self-command, patience, forbearance, temperance, charity, aversion for novelty, and ineradicable love of country, which shall from infancy have been instilled into the minds of all, fostered by public honours, corroborated by habit, sanctioned by religion. This, therefore, brings us back again to education, which in point of fact is the grand pivot upon which his whole Republic turns, as every state must, in reality, whatever may be its defects or excellencies. Everything depends on the manner of disciplining and instructing youth. Give me the sole direction of the education of a state, and I will convert a republic into a monarchy, or a monarchy into a republic, in the course of thirty years. It is the Archimedean lever that moves the world, as Plato, better than any man, understood. In concluding this outline, which may already be thought too long, I shall, perhaps, be pardoned for advancing

one truth, not sufficiently kept in mind by our contemporaries; and it is this-that, in order to be anything more than a splendid dream, republics must be erected on two pillars, VIRTUE and RELIGION; without which freedom can by no possibility exist, since there is not on earth a good man who would not choose rather the despotism of the Ottoman Sultan, than a commonwealth of irreligious, selfish, base, calculating knaves.

I do not here pause to contrast with the polity which I have slightly sketched, that other more practical scheme of government which, towards the decline of life, Plato brought forward in his "Laws." It has much less originality, and is rather distinguished by an attempt at reconciling lofty theory with practice, by a number of minute details, than for the features which it presents as a whole. But the ancients were partial to those poetical platforms of government, framed by philosophers in their closets, which, without adhering strictly to what might be literally practicable, suggest improvements, and keep alive the desire for them, and faith in their reality, by exhibiting communities moulded at pleasure, conforming to a code of laws intended to approach as nearly as possible to perfection.

Even before Plato's time, Hippodamos, an architect of Miletos, who acquired celebrity in his profession by constructing the Peiræeos, and improving the method of distributing streets, and laying out cities, conceived the plan of an ideal republic, of which Aristotle has preserved an out