The object of such organizations is to create what may be called a cake of custom. All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object, that gradually created "hereditary drill" which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this régime forbids free thought is not an evil,-or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mold of civilization and hardening the soft fiber of early man.

The first recorded history of the Aryan race shows everywhere a king, a council, and-as the necessity of early conflicts required-the king in much prominence and with much power. That there could be in such ages anything like an Oriental despotism or a Cæsarean despotism was impossible: the outside extrapolitical army which maintains them could not exist when the tribe was the nation, and when all the men in the tribe were warriors. Hence, in the time of Homer, in the first times of Rome, in the first times of ancient Germany, the king is the most visible part of the polity, because for momentary welfare he is the most useful. The close oligarchy, the patriciate, which alone could know the fixed law, alone could apply the fixed law, which was recognized as the authorized custodian of the fixed law, had then sole command over the primary social want, it alone knew the code of drill; it alone was obeyed, it alone could drill. Mr. Grote has admirably described the rise of the primitive oligarchies upon the face of the first monarchy: but, perhaps because he so much. loves historic Athens, he has not sympathized with prehistoric Athens; he has not shown us the need of a fixed life when all else was unfixed life.

It would be schoolboyish to explain at length how well the two great republics, the two winning republics, of the ancient world embody these conclusions: Rome and Sparta were drilling aristocracies,

and succeeded because they were such. Athens was indeed of another and higher order, at least to us instructed moderns who know her and have been taught by her; but to the "Philistines" of those days, Athens was of a lower order. She was beaten ; she lost the great visible game which is all that short-sighted contemporaries know; she was the great "free failure" of the ancient world. She began, she announced, the good things that were to come, but she was too weak to display and enjoy them; she was trodden down by those of coarser make and better trained frame.

How much these principles are confirmed by Jewish history is obvious. There was doubtless much else in Jewish history, whole elements with which I am not here concerned; but so much is plain, - the Jews were in the beginning the most unstable of nations, they were submitted to their law and they came out the most stable of nations. Their polity was indeed defective in unity: after they asked for a king, the spiritual and the secular powers (as we should speak) were never at peace and never agreed; and the ten tribes who lapsed from their law melted away into the neighboring nations. Jeroboam has been called the "first Liberal," and religion apart-there is a meaning in the phrase: he began to break up the binding polity which was what men wanted in that age, though eager and inventive minds always dislike it. But the Jews who adhered to their law became the Jews of the day, a nation of a firm set if ever there was one.

It is connected with this fixity that jurists tell us that the title "contract" is hardly to be discovered in the oldest law. In modern days, in civilized days, men's choice determines nearly all they do; but in early times that choice determined scarcely anything. The guiding rule was the law of status. Everybody was born to a place in the community: in that place he had to stay; in that place he found certain duties which he had to fulfill, and which were all he needed

to think of. The net of custom caught men in distinct spots and kept each where he stood.

What are called in European politics "the principles of 1789" are therefore inconsistent with the early world: they are fitted only to the new world in which society has gone through its early task, when the inherited organization is already confirmed and fixed, when the soft minds and strong passions of youthful nations are fixed and guided by hard transmitted instincts. Till then, not equality before the law is necessary, but inequality, for what is most wanted is an elevated élite who know the law; not a good gov ernment seeking the happiness of its subjects, but a dignified and overawing government getting its subjects to obey; not a good law, but a comprehensive law binding all life to one routine. Later are the ages of freedom; first are the ages of servitude. In 1789, when the great men of the Constituent Assembly looked on the long past, they hardly saw anything in it which could be praised or admired or imitated: all seemed a blunder, -a complex error to be got rid of as soon as might be. But that error had made themselves; on their very physical organization the hereditary mark of old times was fixed; their brains were hardened and their nerves were steadied by the transmitted results of tedious usages. The ages of monotony had their use, for they trained men for ages when they need not be monotonous.

IV.

BUT even yet we have not realized the full benefit of those early polities and those early laws. They not only "bound up" men in groups, not only impressed on men a certain set of common usages, but oftenat least in an indirect way-suggested, if I may use the expression, national character.

We cannot yet explain-I am sure at least I cannot attempt to explain-all the singular phenomena

of national character: how completely and perfectly they seem to be at first framed; how slowly, how gradually they can alone be altered, if they can be altered at all. But there is one analogous fact which may help us to see, at least dimly, how such phenomena are caused. There is a character of ages as well as of nations; and as we have full histories of many such periods, we can examine exactly when and how the mental peculiarity of each began, and also exactly when and how that mental peculiarity passed away. We have an idea of Queen Anne's time, for example, or of Queen Elizabeth's time or George II.'s time; or again of the age of Louis XIV. or Louis XV. or the French Revolution: an idea more or less accurate in proportion as we study, but probably, even in the minds which know these ages best and most minutely, more special, more simple, more unique than the truth was. We throw aside too much, in making up our images of eras, that which is common to all The English character was much the same in many great respects in Chaucer's time as it was in Elizabeth's time or Anne's time, or as it is now but some qualities were added to this common element in one era and some in another; some qualities seemed to overshadow and eclipse it in one era and others in another. We overlook and half forget the constant while we see and watch the variable. But for that is the present point- why is there this variable? Every one must, I think, have been puzzled about it. Suddenly in a quiet time—say in Queen Anne's time - arises a special literature, a marked variety of human expression, pervading what is then written and peculiar to it: surely this is singular.

eras.

The true explanation is, I think, something like this: One considerable writer gets a sort of start because what he writes is somewhat more-only a little more very often, as I believe - congenial to the minds around him than any other sort. This writer is very often not the one whom posterity remembers,

not the one who carries the style of the age farthest towards its ideal type, and gives it its charm and its perfection. It was not Addison who began the essaywriting of Queen Anne's time, but Steele; it was the vigorous forward man who struck out the rough notion, though it was the wise and meditative man who improved upon it and elaborated it and whom posterity reads. Some strong writer or group of writers thus seize upon the public mind, and a curious process soon assimilates other writers in appearance to them. To some extent, no doubt, this assimilation is effected by a process most intelligible and not at all curious, the process of conscious imitation: A sees that B's style of writing answers, and he imitates it. But definitely aimed mimicry like this is always rare: original men who like their own thoughts do not willingly clothe them in words they feel they borrow; no man, indeed, can think to much purpose when he is studying to write a style not his own. After all, very few men are at all equal to the steady labor, the stupid and mistaken labor mostly, of making a style: most men catch the words that are in the air, and the rhythm which comes to them they do not know from whence; an unconscious imitation determines their words, and makes them say what of themselves they would never have thought of saying. Every one who has written in more than one newspaper knows how invariably his style catches the tone of each paper while he is writing for it, and changes to the tone of another when in turn he begins to write for that. He probably would rather write the traditional style to which the readers of the journal are used, but he does not set himself to copy it; he would have to force himself in order not to write it if that was what he wanted. Exactly in this way, just as a writer for a journal without a distinctly framed purpose gives the readers of the journal the sort of words and the sort of thoughts they are used to, so on a larger scale the writers of an age, without thinking

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