In a survey of the legacy of Ancient Greece to our modern civilization
and its problems, it might well seem at first sight as though the
political contribution of Greece could be ignored. Greek art, Greek
literature, Greek philosophy are among the world's abiding possessions,
for the human passions and questionings which gave them birth and the
human needs to which they minister will last as long as human life
itself. But Greek political thinking is so much bound up with the
peculiar and evanescent external conditions of fifth and fourth century
Greece, centres indeed so exclusively round the special problems of its
intellectual metropolis, Athens, that its interest might appear to have
passed away with the régime to which it owes its existence. The
_Agamemnon_ and the _Antigone_, with their teachings of destiny and
duty, the Hermes of Olympia and the Parthenon frieze, with their
ever-irresistible charm of youthfulness, the _Phaedo_ with its
discussion of immortality, the _Metaphysics_ of Aristotle with their
still subtler and more abstruse speculations, source of so much of our
Christian doctrine and apologetic--all these require little defence
against the Philistine of to-day, if only he can be induced to gaze at
his intended victim before he delivers his blow. But Thucydides with his
long and detailed account of an inter-tribal or inter-municipal war,
decked out with sham speeches which were never delivered: Plato with his
imaginary Utopia, half a small Greek provincial town, half an impossible
and unendurably regimented socialist model community, based on a
fine-drawn and fallacious comparison between the qualities of the human
soul and the class-divisions which happened to prevail in the Greek
society of the time: Aristotle with his laborious investigations into
the municipal pathology of his day and his detailed prescriptions for
the betterment of his fellow-provincials and their institutions--what
have we to do with all this in an age of world problems and conflicts
and of not merely continent-wide but international ideas and projects of
organization? The first duty of any one who seeks to interest the modern
reader in Greek political discussion is to be perfectly frank and lucid
about its limitations. He need have no cause to be afraid that, when
these have been written off from his prospectus, there will be too
little of value remaining.
These limitations can be summarized under two main heads. They arise,
firstly, from a _difference of scale_, and secondly, from a _difference
of outlook_, between ancient and modern political thought.
The difference of scale leaps to the eye at once, although its
consequences are not all of them so obvious. Ancient Greece was, for
political purposes, a congeries of sovereign states, generally centring
round the urban metropolis of a rural district smaller than that of an
average English county. The material upon which Greek political thought
worked was, therefore, from our modern point of view not only
small-scale but almost Lilliputian. This can best be appreciated when we
consider how many gradations of scale are interposed in the modern world
between the government of a town or district of the size of
fifth-century Athens and the government of our own sovereign state, the
British Commonwealth. Athens was far smaller than Leeds, Johannesburg,
or Chicago: yet to be Mayor of any of these is not to fill a position of
commanding responsibility, as political responsibility is understood in
the large-scale world of to-day. The American State, the South African
province and Dominion and (for certain purposes) the English County
stand between the giant municipality and the sovereign parliament. To a
British Premier passing from a coal strike which reacts upon the trade
of the entire world to an Imperial Conference engaged in tracing out an
agreed line of policy on the Pacific Question, the problems of a
Pericles, or even of an Alexander, would seem but child's play.
Let us see what results from this difference of scale. In the first
place, Greek political thought although (as we shall see) it aimed at
_universality_, at arriving at certain definite laws or conclusions
about politics, never succeeded in divesting itself of a certain element
of local or national individuality. When Plato and Thucydides think and
write of 'the State' they are also thinking of the City--the same word,
_polis_, serves indeed for the two--and not merely of the City, i. e.,
of any municipality, but of a particular city. There are elements in
Greek political thought which, just because they owe their inspiration
to Athens, can never be universalized. A treatise on education in which
general psychological conclusions were intermingled with conclusions
based on experience at some English school with a very unique tradition,
would require to be carefully examined and applied with caution to the
problems of adolescent life in Japan or Nigeria. Similarly, in so far as
Greek political thought is Athenian or (to use a much disputed term in
what I hold to be its proper sense) _national_, it is not truly
political.
The distinction that I am trying to draw is a difficult one and cannot
be understood without a short digression about the nature of the study
of politics. Politics is the study or activity of government, of the
management of the public or common affairs of men. We need
'politicians', men who will devote themselves to meeting the demand for
the management of our common affairs--we need them not because we are
Englishmen, Irishmen, or Americans, but because we are human beings
living together in society, and because our co-operative relations and
activities require to be guided and controlled. Whether the 'politician'
is a tyrant or a Minister of the people is not here to the point; the
point is that he is the manager of what the Romans called _res publica_,
the Latin for the good old English word 'Commonwealth'. Politics is
therefore primarily concerned with the practical problems arising out of
the fact that a number of different human beings are living together,
and the more different they are and the smaller their greatest common
measure, the more truly political do such problems become. The first
business, of the politician or governor is, as Aristotle said, to see
that men shall live (the twin problems of supply and defence), his
second to see that they shall live well (in the first instance the
problems of health and physical development and well-being). In the last
analysis _pure politics_, as our great grandchildren may discover if
ever the World-State becomes a reality, is mainly concerned with
_administration_, administration of the affairs common to all in the
interests of all.
Now ancient Greek politics were entangled, and modern politics also are
still too largely entangled, with the discussion of matters which are
not _common_ at all, and do not constitute the material of politics in
the true sense of the word--with questions arising, not out of the
common need for a common law, but out of the inner ultimate and
ineradicable differences between the various nations and other groupings
of mankind. When the League of Nations or the Dublin City Council is
discussing an epidemic of small-pox or the improvement of some dock or
wharf, or schools for mothers, or the problem of juvenile employment it
is dealing with common interests which affect human beings as human
beings: it is on the plane of politics proper. But when the Dublin City
Council, following in the wake of the nineteenth century democratic
movement throughout Europe, puts forward some proposal in order to give
satisfaction to the sentiment that Ireland being the home of a nation
ought to be a sovereign state, and when the League of Nations is asked
to deal with the political situation created by the clash of contending
nationalisms in the British Isles or elsewhere, both bodies, as
governing bodies, are out of their depth: for they are faced with an
impossible task. Established to deal with politics proper, with the
common affairs of men as men, they are bound to flounder helplessly when
they are cajoled into the thorny intimate and (let it be added) far more
fascinating region of national and individual personality--to a region
where, the deeper you penetrate, the less common, uniform, standardized
or standardizable are the interests involved, and the less susceptible
of being 'settled', or even understood, by the rough and ready
politician accustomed to deal with matters in the bulk and to measure up
the results on a quantitative reckoning in the cold and cosmopolitan
language of statistics.
In reading the Greek political writers then, we must be careful to
distinguish the universal from the local and ephemeral element. The
latter is indeed of great interest and value; but we shall tend to miss
the really precious and permanent elements in their thought if we do not
take pains to disentangle Thucydides the disillusioned Athenian patriot
from Thucydides the scientific historian and psychologist, and Plato the
aristocrat born out of due season from Plato the unrivalled student of
human nature and of the permanent needs of human society.
The failure to recognize this distinction has led to much
misunderstanding and shallow thinking in attempts to apply Greek ideas
and maxims too literally to modern life. It is only too common to hear
Englishmen, whose knowledge of politics and history, outside the
newspapers, is confined to stray reminiscences from a not very ardent
pursuit of the classics in their school and college days, basing
confident predictions of the failure of modern democracy on some _obiter
dictum_ of Thucydides or Plato and assessing the fate of the British
Commonwealth in terms borrowed from some judgement of Sallust or Tacitus
on its wholly different Roman prototype. It is flippancy or pedantry
like this which gives rise to the onslaughts of a Cobden or Herbert
Spencer or an H. G. Wells and to the practical man's suspicion of a
classical education. One might as well go to last year's market reports
for guidance in a business deal of to-day as have recourse to Plato, or,
for that matter, to Macchiavelli, in an existing political emergency. If
a classical education, designed as it is in England to promote
'character' rather than 'intellect' (a vicious distinction which leaves
no room for such a quality as intellectual integrity) often leaves
behind it but a meagre residuum of knowledge and ideas, it should at
least cause the public school man of yesterday and the London clubman of
to-day to realize the limitations of his field of study and to abstain
from confident political generalization. The Labour M.P. who once
remarked to the writer, _à propos_ of an Indian debate, that he had been
in the House just long enough to know that all he knew about India was
that he knew nothing about it, had been brought up, if not in a better
at least in a cannier school. There is no sounder training for the
student of politics and history, or indeed of any serious subject, than
to know everything about something, whether it be the chronological
order of Plato's dialogues or the problem of humidity in weaving-sheds,
or about placing a field or keeping a wicket. That is why the Duke of
Wellington who, if he lacked the intellectuality of a Foch, at least
knew both his England and his own job of military science, selected the
playing fields rather than the classical classrooms of Eton as the home
and training-ground of that concentrated and disinterested endeavour of
mind and spirit which had carried his army through patient years of
effort to victory. It is all to the good that our classical devotees,
faced with criticism and competition from many quarters, should be
acquiring both a greater humility and a greater seriousness.
Our first caution then, is that Greek political thought is both national
and universal, and that we must learn to distinguish what pertains to
nationality from what pertains to government.
A second result which flows from the small-scale character of Greek
politics is that we nowhere find an adequate treatment of the problem
of _foreign relations_. Foreign policy is one of the weak spots of
modern democracy; it is, perhaps, the element in our political technique
which is most in need of thoroughgoing revision. We have yet to induce
the modern citizen to pay continuous attention to issues which, although
they are seemingly remote from his purview, may at any moment shake the
whole fabric of his everyday existence; and, when we have done this, we
have to persuade him to approach these world-problems not in the spirit
of a competitive aggrandizement but with a view to discovering what is
the best line of policy in the interests of the world as a whole. So
long as the peoples remain self-absorbed, the governments will continue
to conduct their mutual relations on a basis of individual
self-interest, and the meetings of the Assembly of the League of Nations
will remain what they are at present, not gatherings of statesmen solely
bent, each from his own angle and upbringing, on the welfare of
humanity, but barterings of politicians who (with rare exceptions) have
come to the fair to do the best business they can for their own clients.
Now Thucydides and Plato give us no help for the League of Nations. Such
a phrase as 'the interests of humanity as a whole' would have been
politically meaningless to them. They did not think of humanity as a
whole; they thought of it as divided sharply into two sections, Greeks
and Barbarians, and of the Greek world as a small oasis of intelligence
and culture ringed round by a wide and indefinite expanse of barbarism.
We also, it is true, speak of 'advanced' and 'backward' peoples: but the
latter are not, as they were to the Greeks, a formidable mass, tribe
upon tribe, of military power extending up to and beyond the known or
legendary confines of the world; they are child-races under our watchful
care and control. We have explored and surveyed the whole earth, and
where we find weakness or inferiority, we establish a trusteeship. To
the Greeks, ever on their guard against barbarian inroads from north,
south, east and west, from Scythians and Libyans, Persians and
Carthaginians, the mandate clause of the Covenant would have seemed both
theoretically undesirable and practically impossible. No Greek writer
ever dreamed of a system of international co-operation between the
governments of the world as men then knew it. All of them thought in
terms of competition and ever-recurrent warfare or, at best, of a
precarious balance of power. Even Plato's Utopia had its soldier class;
and they were real soldiers, not merely police. In this respect, at any
rate, vanquished Germany, with practically the whole of her population
relieved from military duty and available for productive tasks, has the
advantage over the most ideal construction of ancient Greece.
There is a further point to be noted under this head. If Greek thought
gives us no guidance in foreign policy, it is no more helpful, except
very indirectly, in another difficult region, that of _industrial
policy_. The problem of industrial policy, or what is sometimes roughly
described as the Labour problem, may perhaps be thus stated: how to
secure or maintain for civilized mankind (or for our own particular
section of it) the goods and services it needs, whilst at the same time
providing justice and freedom for those who produce them. To put it more
shortly, how to secure that a good life for the consumer shall be
compatible with a good life for the producer. It is a problem which goes
to the root of democracy: for the world has never yet known a time when
the increase of wealth and the consequent growth of refinement and
civilization in the upper section of the community did not lead to
degradation and injustice in the lower. Here too the Greeks can give us
no help. They did not even face the problem but fail to solve it, like
the Romans. Their material civilization was so simple that the problem
hardly arose for them at all--except in certain cases, such as that of
the mine-slaves. But the fact that they acquiesced, without a twinge of
conscience or a trace of repining, in the institution of slavery
indicates how they would probably have faced it had it arisen. Confront
Plato with the complexity of modern industry, prove to him, as any
modern lecturer could, that, for Northern man at any rate, life can only
be maintained without degradation on a basis of widespread industrialism
and with our familiar equipment of railways, steamships, telephones, _et
hoc genus omne_, and it is safe to predict that he would fail to give
the reply which the modern reformer would expect from him. Instead of
embracing one of the many current varieties of socialism which
masquerade as his bastard progeny, he would either accept his
interlocutor's premisses and tell him to build up his precious northern
civilization on a basis of slavery; or he would reject them and advise
him, with Samuel Butler, to make a bonfire of the machines. The latter
is, indeed, the more probable alternative; for it is that to which the
more thoughtful and prophetic (perhaps one can add also, the more
Hellenic) of our modern guides are turning. When men so diverse as
Tagore the Indian sage and Rathenau the German Trust magnate tell us
that the disease from which we are suffering is 'mechanization', and
that our crying need is for greater simplicity, it seems safe to predict
that Plato would not reject the possibility of providing a 'good life'
for the modern man in a world divested of most of the rattling and
tinkling paraphernalia of which the nineteenth century so plumed itself
as the inventor.
Let us pass now to our second limitation, that arising not from the
difference of scale but from the difference of outlook between Greek and
modern speculation. We can best sum this up by saying that whereas
modern political thought, like modern thought generally, works from the
inner to the outer, from the individual to the state and society, the
ancient thinkers habitually work in the opposite direction, setting the
interests of the community or state above those of the individual. This
is what Fustel de Coulanges intended to convey when he declared that
ancient man had no conception of the meaning of liberty. Liberty is no
doubt a somewhat confusing and ambiguous term; it is hard to cut it
loose from its political associations, from national independence and
democratic self-government. We can perhaps therefore improve upon the
French writer by saying that the Greek political thinkers do not
recognize, or do not make proper allowance for, the rights and
responsibilities of the individual soul. Just as they failed to
distinguish between Nationality and Government, so they failed also to
distinguish between Conscience and Public duty. Socrates, indeed,
meeting his death in obedience both to Conscience and Law, had a glimpse
of the higher truth; but his followers did not take up this side of his
message or, in so far as they did so in their study of individual
morality, they did not relate it to their theories of politics. It was a
greater than Socrates who summed up and put the problem with his
incomparable directness and irony: _Render unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's_. If this had been
said in the presence of Thucydides, the keenest practical brain that
applied itself to Greek political thinking, he simply would not have
known what it meant. To him Caesar and God, or, to translate them into
his own language, Athens and Athena, were not opposing but practically
identical terms. When the Athenian, as he described him, 'spent his
body, as a mere external tool, in the city's service and counted his
mind as most truly his own when employed on her behalf,' he was,
according to the universal Greek belief, serving both his God and his
neighbour, both his own highest good and the noblest of the world's
causes. His life was a unity: for he had not yet learned to disentangle
his soul from the soul of the City or the herd, or his God from the god
of Israel or of Athens. The Greek thinkers, as we shall see, sincerely
endeavoured to distinguish between the 'good citizen' and 'the good man'
and to base the State on foundations of the spirit; but their work was
vitiated by their failure to realize the extent and urgency of the claim
of the individual soul. Men must be spiritually free before they can
co-operate politically on the highest terms. In the last analysis the
weakness of Greek political speculation can be traced back to the
weakness of Greek religion. Even Plato played with Pagan orthodoxy and
gave the Delphic Apollo a titular place in his Utopia, proving himself
as timid in touching Greek superstitions as English thinkers to-day are
in touching the Monarchy. It is this basis of insincerity which reveals
itself throughout the superstructure. Greek political thought contains
already the germs of the disease which, centuries later, led men,
plebeians first, later patricians also, to turn away from the outworn
symbols that stood for the union of Church and State and to seek comfort
in a religion which, if it undermined and eventually overturned the last
and greatest of the ancient Empires, established the City of the Soul
upon a firm and enduring basis. Julian's _Vicisti Galilaee_ marked the
end of one strain or tradition in ancient political thought which,
originating in the local worships of the City-State, had lasted on, with
gathering momentum, until, all over the known world, men bowed the knee
before the altar of Caesar, the God-Emperor. From this there was no way
forward except through revolution; and mankind paid, in the night of the
Dark Ages, for sins of compromise and insincerity committed during long
centuries of enlightenment.
The liabilities thus frankly stated, let us turn to the assets.
The first valuable contribution the Greeks made to political study was
that they invented it. It is not too much to say that, before
fifth-century Greece, politics did not exist. There were powers and
principalities, governments and subjects, but politics no more existed
than chemistry existed in the age of alchemy. An imitation of an idea,
as Plato has taught us, is not the same as an idea; nor is the imitation
of a science the same as a science. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Croesus
the Lydian and Cyrus the Persian, ruled over great empires; but within
their dominions there were no politics because there were no public
affairs. There were only the private affairs of the sovereign and his
ruling class. Government and all that pertained to it, from military
service and taxation to the supply of women for the royal harem, was
simply the expression of the power and desire of the ruler. The great
advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common
interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and
secondly for their study. In other words, the Greeks were the first to
rescue the body politic from charlatans and to hand it over to
physicians.
How great an achievement this was we can best recognize when we consider
how large a place the true study of politics, and the terms and ideas to
which it has given rise, fills in the life of the modern man--especially
of the modern Englishman. Justice and liberty, law and democracy,
parliament and public opinion--all these and many more we owe to the
peasants and craftsmen of the small Greek republics who, having felt the
need for a better management of their humble concerns, set to work to
provide it, with the same inventiveness, the same adaptation of means to
end, which led them, in other fields, to the invention of the classic
temple or of the drama. If it is going too far to say that every modern
politician owes his stock-in-trade of general ideas to the Greeks, there
are certainly few who do not owe them their perorations.
This is not the place to enlarge on the features of Greek political
organization or to point out the various elements in Greek political
theory or practice which have proved of permanent value. Only a very
summary appreciation can be attempted. But certain points can be picked
out as being of special interest to the citizen of to-day.
In the first place, the Greeks, having made clear to themselves that
public or common affairs existed, sat down resolutely to study them.
Convinced believers in reason, they did not fall into the convenient
English fallacy of believing that institutions are not made but 'grow',
or that difficulties which seem too thorny for timid fingers to touch
will settle themselves by being left alone. Political problems, they
felt, were caused by men, by the interaction of human wills and desires,
and by men, by the conscious and deliberate application of human
intelligence, they could and must be solved. In spite of their belief in
mysterious powers which control the destinies of men and nations, they
did not think it decent to abandon public affairs to Providence; nor did
they avert their gaze from them as too mundane for the squeamish
intellectual to handle and turn them over to the tender mercies of the
ignorant and less scrupulous demagogue or doctrinaire. Their public
affairs were no more interesting than ours: they were indeed
considerably less interesting--unless we are prepared to argue that the
election of generals to command an army far smaller than the Swiss is a
more arresting issue than the choice of a government to bear rule over
400 millions of men on five continents, or that the question of peace or
war between two small neighbouring mountain territories outweighs in
interest the discussion of the relations between the white and yellow
races of mankind. And, if Greek politics were not interesting in
themselves, they suffered still further by comparison with the other
topics which lay ready to claim the Greek citizen's attention. The
modern voter who is too idle to cast his ballot, will give up to
business or to pleasure, to motor-car and music-hall, the time and the
trouble that he owes to humanity. When the Athenian spent a hot and
exhausting day (for why should we think their nerves less susceptible to
glare than ours?) listening to a parliamentary debate or to a lawsuit on
a hard stone seat in the open air, he was postponing till to-morrow, or
till his crops and fruit-trees permitted him the leisure, the discussion
of some masterpiece of drama or some new issue of human thought which
had leapt during the last few days or months from the brain of a fellow
citizen into immortality. If it is hard for the citizen of New York to
spare the time to dethrone Tammany, or for the electors of Great Britain
to uproot its more outwardly respectable analogue on this side of the
Atlantic, when his life, and his newspapers, are full of vulgar and
ephemeral distractions, how much harder must it have been for a
Euripidean enthusiast, or a student of Socrates or Protagoras, to
descend for long days to solid earth in order to strike a bargain with a
Thracian chieftain or to assess some poor devil's damages in drachmae!
Let us honour, not pity or despise them, for having thought it right to
do so, for having deliberately determined to infuse into public affairs,
in themselves so drab and dull, so deficient in the fineness and
subtlety which characterize men's more intimate concerns, the interest
derived from the very fact that honest, sincere, and able minds devoted
themselves to their study. As Huxley could make the geological
procession of the ages revolve round a piece of chalk, and Sir Richard
Owen reconstruct primitive man from the bone of his great toe, so the
citizen of Athens, as we see him depicted for us in the pages of
Thucydides, could raise the great permanent issues of politics, and
cause them to remain living for us two thousand years later, in debates
which were ostensibly concerned with mere provincial trivialities. When
such was the atmosphere created, no wonder that those who stayed away
were held up to obloquy in an expression (ιδιωτης {idiôtês}) of which
our English 'idiot' is the exact transcription.
Let us dwell for a moment on the attitude of mind in which the Greek
citizen approached political problems. He was both a Conservative and a
Radical; or rather, he brought to politics the best of Conservatism
together with the best of Radicalism. He was a Conservative because he
reverenced tradition and recognized the power and value of custom. None
of our modern Conservative writers and defenders of the existing order,
not Burke himself or Bismarck or Chateaubriand, had a deeper sense than
the Athenian for 'those unwritten ordinances whose transgression brings
admitted shame'. Athens was a Conservative democracy. Most democracies,
despite the labels of their politicians, are in reality Conservative;
for the common man whose régime they represent is Conservative from the
very nature of his life and occupation; it takes leisure and travel, or
a wider education than any democracy has as yet bestowed on its young
people, to lift the minds of the mass of men out of the rut of habit.
But Athens was far more Conservative than the modern democracies with
whom we are acquainted. Where the British public rebukes an awkward
writer by conspiring to boycott his books, so that, unless he has
private means, he is eventually silenced, where the United States, going
a step farther, deny his works the privilege of the mails, Athens does
not scruple to administer hemlock, and, if an _élite_ is indignant or
sorrowful, the democracy applauds. Even at the height of the recent Red
Terror the United States never went so Conservative as this. This should
help us to realize the rock-firm basis of tradition, of use and wont, of
patriarchal sanctities, which underlay the working of fifth-century
Athenian democracy as we watch its apparent vicissitudes. The citizen
could use his mind as freely as he would on the material presented to
him for his consideration; but there was a point at which the State, and
his own instincts, cried 'Halt'; and, except in rare cases, he obeyed.
It is only fair to add that the most enlightened modern opinion would
entirely support the Athenian view against the discussion of 'unwritten
laws' in Parliament. The difference between the Conservative Athenian
democrat and the modern Liberal in such matters is, not that the one
refuses, while the other demands, the discussion of life's sanctities in
Parliament and law-court, but that the one appeals to custom and the
other to conscience as the sanction of the unwritten law itself. Whether
it be the gods or man, the law of the hearth or of the heart, that is at
issue, both agree that what is private and holy has no place in the
forum of common debate.
But, within these well-recognized limits, the Greek citizen was a
Radical; that is to say, he was ready to apply his reason to public
affairs without fear or prejudice. He loved straight and sincere
thinking; he tried hard to face the real situation before him and not to
be clouded or led astray by side-issues or inhibitions. There is many a
lesson in common honesty to be learnt by our politicians and public in
the speeches of Thucydides. Shallow critics have been known to dub them
cynical, an adjective which the English, adepts in self-deception, are
fond of applying to nations sincerer in self-analysis than themselves.
When we refuse formally to reopen an issue on which action is in fact
being taken daily, because it is a party question and a Coalition
government is in power, when we leave to the healing mercies of time a
problem with regard to which inaction itself constitutes a policy, when
we deliberately invent party labels or election cries designed to
confuse the mind of the voter and to distract him from the real issue,
when our politicians have become professionals in the art of what
Thucydides described as 'the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty
ends' and a British Premier, more euphemistically, as 'political
strategy', we might do worse than sit down to read, mark, learn, digest,
and apply to our modern situations, the immortal speeches or essays in
which Thucydides lays bare for us the heart of the political life of his
day, and to let them act as a purge of some of our own too sugary diet.
The bitter-sweet of truth is not always popular on the hustings; but it
is good feeding for the plain citizen, whether ancient or modern.
This leads on to a further reflection. The Greeks, in their political
thinking, were essentially realists, rather than idealists. This is true
of all the Greek writers, even those who, like Plato, starting from the
market-place of Athens, lead us up to a Utopia in the clouds. They were
realists in that they based their political studies on the world as it
is and human nature as it is, rather than on some personal and fanciful
conception of what man and the world ought to be. To put it in other
words, they are realists because they are psychologists, because they
applied the psychological method to political problems. That they were
the first to do so goes without saying: for no one before them had
applied any method at all, except in the most rough-and-ready manner.
But they did it so perfectly, with such utter and artistic simplicity,
that those who followed them accepted or criticized their results
without observing the basis of human study on which they were built up,
and it is only in quite recent years, through the work of patient
inquirers who, like Graham Wallas, have laboured systematically in both
fields, that politics and psychology have once more been drawn together.
It may perhaps seem strange to a modern reader to be told that, in this
very important respect, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle are sounder in
their method than the whole long line of political thinkers and
statesmen up to our own day. Let the reader who doubts it turn to the
texts. He will find that all the three writers whom I have named toiled
at the study of human nature before they set pen to paper. The
_Republic_ opens with several books of psychological analysis, no doubt
at times a little fantastic in its attempts at premature classification,
but full of life and reality, and not only Greek reality but human
reality. Aristotle precedes his work on _Politics_, in which he embodied
the results of a study of all the available political and constitutional
material of his day--for a Greek could work like a modern German or
American thesis-grubber when he tried--with a book on _Ethics_ which is
still regarded, quite rightly, as a standard work for the modern
student. As for Thucydides, his knowledge of men, the fruit of patient
experience deepened by disappointment, is felt behind every line of his
book, as one descries it in the features of his undegenerate descendant
Venizelos. Turn now to the moderns. Where in Hobbes or in Bentham, in
Locke or Burke or Rousseau, in the individualists or the Socialists, the
Hegelians or the anarchists, do we find, until quite recently, a really
wide and open-minded attempt to see man as he is? Our ears are assailed
by a chorus of catchwords, based on some arbitrary and ephemeral
estimate of men's reactions to outward events and institutions. Men
argue backwards and forwards as to whether 'human nature can be
changed', whether man is guided solely by self-interest, or is only
waiting to be set free from sordid cares to be guided solely by his love
for his fellows, whether fear or hope, custom or the sense of adventure,
form his natural and most compelling spur to action. Meanwhile in the
great debate, in Burke's _Reflections_ as in Marx's _Capital_, in Maine
and Mill and Mazzini, as among the hacks who vulgarize their results in
text-books and election literature, man as he is has vanished behind a
cloud of doctrine or verbiage. We need the simplicity, or cynicism, of
the Greeks to recall us to realities.
Let us for a moment imagine Thucydides face to face with the problems of
our post-war world of to-day. We have only to read his immortal analysis
of the war-mood of Greece, and of the nervous and emotional phenomena
which accompanied it, to realize that his first effort would have been
to explain us to ourselves. He would not allow us to acquiesce idly in
our vague disillusionment, our impatience of foreigners, our suspicion
of the idealisms of the Wilson brand. He would trace our discontent
ruthlessly to its sources and hold up to our eyes the strange compound
of sorrow and fatigue, impatience and disappointment, aspiration and
helplessness which makes us what we are. 'The war-mood brought with it
many and terrible symptoms such as have occurred and will always
continue to occur, so long as human nature remains what it is; though in
a severer or milder form, according to the variety of the particular
cases.' Thucydides would have had eyes for it in all its forms, mild or
severe, simple or complex, pitiful or repulsive. He would show us the
English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and
complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and
bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces,
with the brutal tax-gatherer administering the _coup de grâce_ to its
equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but
dimly understood, in the hope of a new world which victory was to call
into being, exhorted by the nation's leaders to be as daring in its home
policies as in the trenches, and then confronted with a world of failing
markets and impoverished customers and with the full rigour of the
merciless laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished
them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be
ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience,
between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned
trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging
nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare,
half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her
weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies
for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the
intensity of her sensitive nature, to be able to resume, in security and
quietness of mind, the arts and activities of normal life in which she
has been, and will be again, the Athens of the modern world: Germany,
tougher in fibre than her western neighbour yet equally shaken and
exhausted: a land of sheep without a shepherd, rushing hither and
thither seeking for a direction and a _Weltanschauung_, her amazing
powers of industry and concentration and her rich and turbid life of
feeling running to waste for lack of channelled guidance: Belgium,
self-confident, industrious and rejuvenated: Italy, made one at last and
measuring her strength to face the tasks of a new epoch in her history:
and, behind, the great new surging world of the Slav, from the
disciplined enthusiasm of Prague, under her philosopher-president, to
the birth-agonies of a new Russia in the grip of the rough
tyrant-physicians of the Kremlin. All this a modern Thucydides would
attempt to set before us, not forgetting the conservative forces and the
gods of the older generation, the great Catholic and Protestant, Moslem
and Socialist traditions, the power of the bankers and the merchants,
the universities and the press, and all the various types of humanity
produced and hall-marked by their activity. And then, and not till then,
having shown us what we are, each of us in his niche and all of us
together in our little corner in the vast Temple of mankind, having made
us see our pettyisms and orthodoxies against a universal background of
time and space, he would have broken silence and allowed himself to
speak to us of remedies. _Know yourself_ is the first, perhaps the only,
message of the scientific historian to our bewildered age.
But by what right, it will be asked, in this age of _Wissenschaft_ and
_Fachmenschen_, of specialism and research-institutes and organized
intellectual production, do you speak of Thucydides as a scientific
historian? Here is a man who, without a university degree or any
university training at all, after a brief military career for which he
took no staff college course (as witness his generalship), sits down to
write a chronicle of the war in which he played a part, basing his
account simply on his own experience and on the testimony of such
eye-witnesses as he was able to meet. Any tiro on the history staff at a
modern college or university could predict the result--one of those
bulky volumes, full of detail and post-prandial reminiscence, in which
splenetic elderly gentlemen have so often sought to justify their own
existence, and to call down damnation on the War Office, before an
indifferent public. How can anything better be expected from a mere
soldier, a rough practical man, untrained in the arts of research, in
collecting facts on slips of paper and arranging and re-arranging them
till an induction emerges, in looking up reference books in libraries
and 'listing' them in a neat alphabetical bibliography, totally ignorant
of the _Hilfswissenschaften_, the laborious subsidiary studies on the
basis of which scientific history is built up, ignorant even of foreign
languages, who has read no sociology, and is not even aware of its
existence, whose geographical studies are limited to his own journeys
and the tales of his friends, who, finally, has the impertinence to
intersperse his narrative with fictitious speeches, thus destroying any
pretence at a scientific character for his treatise, and revealing it in
its true nature as a mere work of art or imagination? It may indeed be
doubted whether a modern trained librarian, working according to the
classification laid down by the standard Congress library at Washington,
would, when his attention was drawn to it, admit so offending a writer
on to his history shelves at all. His place, he would probably say, is
with the prose-poets, or with the writers of historical fiction next
door to them.
Yet turn to the opening chapters of Thucydides' book. You will find most
of the sciences on which long modern treatises are written: but you will
find something more: you will find them blended into a unity. Let those
who deny that Thucydides was a sociologist, who continue to claim that
Herbert Spencer, inventor of the horrid word, invented also the science,
re-read Thucydides' account of the evolution (for it was as an evolution
that he saw and depicted it) of Greek society from the earliest times to
his own day. Let those who cry up anthropology examine into his
treatment of legend and custom and his power, untrained in Seminar or
institute, to use it as sociological evidence. Let the geographers, too
forgetful sometimes that man is not the creature of environment alone,
refresh their minds by recalling those brilliant sallies in geographical
thinking in which he explains some of the features of early Greek
settlement and city-building. It is not only orthodox history, of the
school of Ranke, of which Thucydides is the father and inspirer: there
is not one of the many movements which have sought to broaden out
historical study in recent years, from Buckle and Leplay and Vidal de la
Blache down to the psycho-analysts of our own day and of to-morrow who
will not find in Thucydides some gleaming anticipation along the path of
their own thought.
Here we touch upon what is perhaps the cardinal merit of the Greek
political thinkers, as it is of the Greek contribution as a whole. They
saw all the problems: but saw each in its place within the larger whole.
They 'saw life steadily and saw it whole'. Matthew Arnold's line is
hackneyed enough; but it cannot be bettered. To put the same thought in
another way, the Greeks were natural Catholics, while we of to-day,
especially on the political field, are constantly relapsing into an
unhelpful Protestantism. By Catholicism I mean nothing doctrinal, or
indeed religious at all, but simply the habit of mind which insists on
looking at the whole before the parts, at setting the common before the
sectional interest, and in sweetening and harmonizing the inevitable
contrarieties and antagonisms of life by remaining steadily conscious of
its major and reconciling interests. A Catholic is one whose intellect,
to use the words of Newman, himself, despite his religious label, one of
the greatest of the tribe, 'cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive,
cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient,
collected and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every
beginning, the origin in each end, the law in every interruption, the
limit in each delay, because it ever knows where it stands and how its
path lies from one point to another'. Protestantism, on the other hand,
is the attitude of protest, of revolt, of indignation: the spirit which
is conscious only of what it is _against_, and is too ignorant, or too
angry, to survey the whole field of problems involved in its protest or
to think out an alternative scheme. If the Greeks can render us no other
service in our discontents they can at least lift us, by the example of
their wide and fearless vision, out of our petty Protestant
rebelliousness and recrimination and plant our feet solidly on the rock
of steady Catholic thinking.
Take a few instances, drawn from Plato, of what I call the Catholic
spirit. Perhaps the most difficult and unsettling of all our modern
problems is that of the relations between men and women in a society
which has granted or is about to grant to women complete equality of
rights and opportunities without having effected the corresponding inner
revolution of thought and sentiment. Masculine society, in other words,
despite a multitude of professions, has not yet admitted, still less
assimilated, the educated woman into its ranks. Here is a problem with
far reaching and most difficult implications which Plato discussed more
than two thousand years ago, but in how different a spirit from so many
of the 'feminists' of to-day. Not that he was less 'advanced' in his
speculations: he was ready to face all that there was to face and to go
a good deal farther in his suggestions of policy than would be regarded
as printable in a modern English or American review. But his spirit is
throughout perfectly serene and, in the best sense of the word,
scientific, so that he can work out his argument to the end without a
trace of squeamishness or false modesty. Where shall we find in our
modern discussions of women's employment, equal work for equal pay, and
the like, the central point so simply and clearly stated as in the
following sentence: 'Then, if we find either the male or the female sex
excelling the other in any art or other pursuit, we shall say that this
particular pursuit must be assigned to one and not to the other; but if
we find that the difference simply consists in this, that the female
conceives and the male begets, we shall not allow that that goes any way
to prove that a woman differs from a man with reference to the subject
of which we are speaking, and we shall still consider that our guardians
and their wives should follow the same pursuits.' If all our modern
discussion were as clean and direct as this, we should have made greater
progress in this subject by now. Greek intellectual integrity, and
clarity of thought and expression, were not hampered by a festering and
obstructive legacy of what it is a libel on a great movement to describe
as Puritanism.
Take a second example--the influence of occupation on character. This is
a subject which goes to the root of many of our social problems for,
till we have studied the reactions of different classes of employment,
not only on the body but on the mind, and perfected our methods of
vocational guidance, we shall still have left open one of the greatest
avenues to unhappiness. The modern inquirer will find a very interesting
adumbration of this line of thought in the _Republic_; and if here, as
in the problem of the relations between men and women, he finds Plato's
remedies somewhat drastic, and is inclined to dissent from his veto on
actors and acrobats, let him consider the appalling extent to which,
during recent generations, the consumer has been pampered at the expense
of the producer, and ask himself how often, when he attends a music-hall
as a narcotic after a distracting day, or when he rings up on the
telephone or books a ticket at a railway office, he considers the kind
of life to which he is an accomplice in condemning those who minister to
his needs and desires. Plato believed in the value of beauty and, being
more than a mere modern aesthete, held no skindeep creed. He knew and
understood the vital significance of rhythm and harmony, of grace and
freedom, in the outward order of life as in the soul; and if he found
himself plunged down in the centre of one of our modern hives of
progress he would have some searching questions to ask. For 'absence of
grace' he tells us 'and bad rhythm and bad harmony are sisters to bad
words and bad nature' and 'we would not have our guardians reared among
images of evil as in a foul pasture and there day by day, and little by
little, gather impressions from all that surrounds them, until at last a
great mass of evil gathers in their inmost souls and they know it not'.
Has the most widespread malady of our time ever been better diagnosed;
and do not our capitalist and socialist physicians, with their merely
material remedies, look very small by the side of this commanding and
convincing simplicity of statement?
We have dwelt upon some of the special directions in which Thucydides
and Plato can be of help to us. Let us now turn briefly to the third of
the great triad. Aristotle is, of course, the most systematic thinker of
the three: and it is just for that very reason that the two elements
already noted in Greek political thought, the local and ephemeral and
the universal, are most closely interwoven and most baffling to
disentangle. Tutor of Alexander though he was, his mind is incapable of
stepping outside the city-state framework. His _Ethics_ is half a
treatise on human nature, half a book, akin to the _Characters_ of
Theophrastus, on deportment for a Greek citizen. No wonder that
successive generations of English undergraduates have failed to respond
to the human excellence or social charm, of his hero or paragon,
described as 'the big-souled' or 'magnificent man'. Similarly the
_Politics_ is a book in which it needs a trained reader, already
familiar with Greek life, to pick out the universal from the particular
and draw his own modern conclusions. But when you have read, say, the
first book of the _Politics_ in this spirit, when you have ruled out
from what is said of the State all that pertains solely to the City,
when you have made allowance for the hazardous biological,
psychological, and sociological generalizations ('man is more of a
political animal than bees or other gregarious animals', 'he who is by
nature not his own but another's and not a man is by nature a slave',
'the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the
individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part'), based,
as the examples show, on the embryonic condition of those sciences at
the time, you have a large residuum of practical wisdom that is and will
remain of value to the modern world.
Let us look for a moment at one element in this legacy, for it has
recently become a subject of much controversy--Aristotle's conception of
the State, and of its relation to other social and political groupings.
As has already been said, Greek political thought is open to criticism
for unduly neglecting the claim of the individual. Aristotle is less
open to this indictment than either of his great compeers: he does
indeed allow, for certain favoured individuals, an inner or
'theoretical' life, as he calls it, remote from the concerns of the
City-State and almost, except for its excessive intellectuality,
recalling the monastic ideal of the Middle Age. But this is only for the
fewest. Nevertheless it involved the admission that behind the citizen
remained the man, who might conceivably on occasion have his rights,
that 'political science', as he says, 'does not make men', as Thucydides
regarded Athens as making Athenians, 'but receives them from nature and
uses them'. And the justification for this taking over of human nature
by the state, this subjection of man over the whole or part of his
nature, is clearly set forth. It is that 'man when perfected [i. e.
taken over and educated by the State] is the best of animals, but, when
separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all', or, as he puts
it in another place, the man who does not participate in State or city
life is 'either a beast or a god'--more likely (as the order of the
words indicates) the former. In other words, it is law and justice, not,
as Thucydides would have it, an exaltation of the spirit to its highest
power, nor, as Plato preaches, some organic identification between the
inner life of the soul and the outward order of society, which is the
basis and justification of politics. 'It is justice', he says, using the
word in a strict, not a platonic or metaphysical sense, 'which is the
bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, i. e. the
determination of what is just, which is the principle of order in
political society.'
Now, with this principle clearly laid down, and with the claim of the
individual thus partially or at least implicitly recognized, it is
easier to understand Aristotle's _intransigeant_ attitude towards the
claims of associations other than the state, a point on which much
recent controversy has turned. 'Every state', so his _Politics_ open,
'is an association of some kind, and every association is established
with a view to some good.... But if all associations aim at some good,
the state, or political association, _which is the highest of all and
which embraces all the rest_, aims, and in a greater degree than any
other, at the highest good.' In other words, in cases of conflict of
allegiance between the state or political association and some other
form of grouping, whether Church or Trade Union or professional or
humanitarian organization, the claim of the state must take precedence.
This doctrine has been much attacked as involving an indefensible 'State
absolutism', a denial of 'personality' to lesser groups, even as a
negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of
suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the
Jesuits and other anti-state minorities and protestants on this subject,
reinforcing them from the Nonconformist and Trade Union theories or
inclinations of our own day: and a whole school of younger 'progressive'
intellectuals made bold to follow him. The assault on state-sovereignty
has, however, already been brought to a standstill by the impact of
fact. Strange as it may appear in an age of sectarianism and rebel
theorizing, the war revealed the truth that the mass of mankind, now as
in ancient Greece, respond at need to the call of citizenship: that when
the cry goes up summoning each and all to the tents, it is not this or
that little tabernacle but the protecting shelter of the larger and more
truly representative state organizations to which men flock; that the
sects and conventicles which have fed the enthusiasm and provided the
activity of leisure hours cannot maintain their appeal when the whole
fabric of our society is in danger. Exclusive of those who refused
allegiance on true grounds of conscience, and the despicable remnant who
shammed a similar conviction, the number of Englishmen who definitely
set allegiance to some other political or social grouping before
allegiance to the state was surprisingly small. So little are
fundamental loyalties, or the dictates of an unanalysed common sense,
affected, in this country, by fine-spun theories and arguments.
But what we called commonsense views, after all, can be analysed and
ought to be analysed. And there is a very sound and practical reason, as
Aristotle knew, why men prefer the state to lesser associations. It is
because the state leaves them more free. Those who talk of
state-absolutism are ignoring the simple truth that there is no tyranny
like the tyranny of near neighbours. The smaller the group the tighter
its stranglehold over your life and activities. Groups and lesser
loyalties are highly necessary, and indeed desirable, in our modern
large-scale society; but they involve men, and especially weak-willed
and thoughtless men, in far greater dangers than their larger
citizenship. What the confessional at its worst may be to a woman,
professional or business or other loyalty may be to a man. The modern
world is full of men who have bartered away their integrity of soul to
preserve the unity of the party or the unbroken tradition of the
organization or the interests of the trade or even the existence of the
business. If the secrets of all hearts could be revealed, how many high
officials and dignitaries in Church and Party, in Trade Union and
employers' federation, would be discovered to be thinking and even
saying in private what their lesser loyalties forbid them to proclaim in
public to their fellow-guildsmen. The state, in its larger field, may
sometimes commit terrible blunders and even crimes; but at least, in
these days of large-scale government, it does not expose its citizens to
the daily falsehoods and hypocrisies, to the insidious clogging of the
wheels of progress with the grit of petty personal considerations, which
seem inevitable in the life of the smaller groupings of men and women.
Seen in this light, the state stands out as the guardian not only of
justice but of freedom, of an inner freedom of soul and spirit with
which the professional and syndicalist attitude of mind is so often in
flagrant, if unavowed, contradiction. If all this was not visible to
Aristotle when he penned his immortal opening paragraph of the
_Politics_, he is at least entitled to the credit of having laid his
doctrine of state-sovereignty on a foundation so sure that over twenty
centuries of discussion from the Stoics and Cynics, through Augustine
and Dante, down to Rousseau and Lenin, have not been able to shake it.
Against Church and Soviet, as against sage and hermit and anarchist, the
territorial state still holds its own over the whole civilized world;
and the latest construction of idealism at Geneva, misnamed though it
is, is but an association of such states, far larger indeed in average
size, but of the same kind and composition as those upon which the Greek
philosopher fixed as the true object of political study and the most
effective and enduring agency for securing a good life for civilized
mankind.
What are the chief and most enduring thoughts which contact with the
Greek political thinkers leaves with us? They are surely twofold, the
first concerning the material of politics, the second concerning the men
and women of to-day who are called to be citizens. Public affairs, we
feel, so far from being a tiresome preoccupation or 'a dirty business'
are one of the great permanent interests of the race: if they were not
too trivial or too debasing for great artists like Thucydides and Plato,
we need not fear lest they be too trivial or debasing for ourselves. And
if they are not beneath our study, neither should they elude it by being
enwrapped in clouds of rhetoric or in the cotton-wool of sentimentality.
The Greeks should teach us, once and for all, that the common affairs of
mankind are matter to think about as well as to feel about. What
distinguishes what we call a 'good' statesman and a 'public-spirited'
citizen from their less truly political colleagues is not that they have
warmer feelings--there are as many affectionate sons and loving husbands
among the tools of politics as among the elect--but the fact that by a
resolute use of the related powers of intellect and imagination they
have been able to raise their feelings on to a higher plane and to face
great issues with a mind attuned, not to the familiar appeal of hearth
and home, but to the grander and more difficult music of humanity. The
psychologists are teaching us, in the individual life, how we can
'sublimate' our emotions, when life denies them an outlet on the level
of our desire, by raising them to a higher and more rarified range of
feeling and action. As we can sublimate our love of individuals, so we
can sublimate our love of country, not quenching or denying our
patriotism, but consciously dividing and apportioning it. We must learn
to preserve for our blood and nation that precious part of our gift of
service which, just because it is intimate and of the family, cannot be
offered directly to humanity; but we must learn also the more difficult
lesson of transferring to the international stage, the arena where men,
because they are men, labour at common tasks and seek a greatest common
measure of co-operation, all these interests and loyalties which safely
and rightly belong there. This is the claim and call of the modern
Caesar, whether his separate capitals remain, as they are to-day, in
London, Paris, Washington, and the other centres of state-sovereignty,
or whether mankind can rise, if not in our own day, to the level of a
single allegiance. We shall neglect that call at our peril. For, unless
we render unto Caesar that which is properly his, unless we discard our
unthinking and divisive nationalisms, our noble sentiments will avail us
nothing and, in the civil war of the angels, patriotism against
patriotism, Mammon and Beelzebub will come into their own. In these days
of large-scale organization and mammoth syndicates, it takes a Caesar, a
multi-national government, to keep a giant trust at bay. Had the land of
Washington and Lincoln been broken up into separate governments instead
of drawn together into a single territory of United States, private
interests would have taken and defeated each government in detail, and
freedom would have vanished from the land--unless indeed, in some
conflict of devil with devil, of bank and railroad against oil and
lumber, the angels crept once more into their own. The same reasoning
applies to the smaller governments in other continents to-day. Local
patriotism is but a stripling David in face of the Goliaths of modern
commercialism. More and more men will be driven, if not by reason, then
by exploitation and suffering, to learn the lesson of what is still
mistakenly thought of as imperialism until they find themselves crying
out, with the apostle of the Gentiles, who fought his own battle against
nationalism, 'I appeal unto Caesar.'
But the Greeks have a message for us not only as regards the material of
our politics but as regards ourselves. What can we do to help humanity
forward in these problems of its common affairs? The age of
Utopia-dreams is over. We know now that modern science has made the
world one place and that social salvation is not to be found, as the
early socialists imagined, by fleeing from the haunts of men and
founding some model city in a wilderness. We must make our contribution
here and now, in the drab world in which fate has set us. If we cannot
hope to turn it into Utopia, let us at least make it as much like Utopia
as we can. This, after all, is Plato's message, even in the most
idealistic and visionary of his books. The famous passage is worth
quoting in detail:
'Then do you think any less of our argument because we cannot prove
that it is possible to found a state of the kind we have
described?'
'Surely not,' he said....
'Then do not compel me to show that what we have decided in our
argument could in all respects be reproduced in experience. If we
manage to discover how a state could be organized in any close
correspondence to our description, then you must allow that we have
discovered that your commands could be realized. Will you not be
content with that? I certainly should be.'
'Yes, I will,' he said.
'Then next apparently we must try to discover ... what is the
smallest change by which a state might arrive at this manner of
constitution....'
'Most certainly,' he said.
'Well, there is one change,' I said, 'which I think we could
certainly prove would bring about the revolution. It is certainly
neither a small nor an easy change, but it is possible.'
'What is it?' he said.
'Now,' I said, 'I am at the very topic which we likened to the
greatest wave. Spoken, however, it shall be, even though it is
likely to deluge me with laughter and ridicule.... Consider then
what I am about to say.'
'Say on,' he said.
'Unless,' I said, 'lovers of wisdom bear sovereign rule in states,
or those who are now called sovereigns and governors become sincere
and capable lovers of wisdom, and government and love of wisdom be
brought together, and unless the numerous natures who at present
pursue either government or wisdom, the one to the exclusion of the
other, be forcibly debarred from this behaviour, there will be no
respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor, I fancy, for
humanity; nor will this constitution, which we have just described
in our argument, come to that realization which is possible for it
and see the light of day. It is this which has for so long made me
hesitate to speak. I saw how paradoxical it would sound. For it is
given to few to perceive that no other constitution could ever
bring happiness either to states or individuals.'
Thus far the philosopher of antiquity. His words are sometimes
interpreted as a cry for some philosopher-genius to take the task of
government out of our too feeble grasp. But that is not his message for
us. The age in which philosopher-emperors were possible has passed
beyond recall. To us Plato's words are an appeal to become, each and all
of us, in our own sphere, lovers of wisdom according to the measure of
our ability. If we would amend the world around us--and it is in sore
need of amendment--our first duty is to eschew falsehood and to follow
truth in our own lives, in our thoughts and actions. Revolutions spring
not from without inwards but from within outwards; and it is often when
the external world seems most sick and sorrowful, when selfishness and
irresponsibility sit enthroned in the world's seats of government, that
the power of truth is most active in the silent region of the soul,
strengthening it in order that it may issue forth once again to impress
man's unconquerable purpose of order, justice and freedom upon the
recalcitrant material which forms the stuff of men's common problems on
this small globe of ours.