leader and king of His chosen people, the priesthood alone holding communion with Him in the sacredness of the tabernacle, and yet the people ruling themselves, and organized in the only rational form of government, which is that of a federative republic. For it seems evident that Moses intended originally to confine the communication of the priests with Jehovah in the main to spiritual matters, to elevate their moral nature, and bring them into that direct contact with the fountain of inspiration which alone can raise man from his degradation and lowliness.

This grand conception of a government derived from God himself, the King of the Hebrews, — immortal, invisible, all-powerful, and allsufficient, gave that people a confidence in their Divine Protector that made them invincible for more than four hundred years.

But this theocracy, though very powerful, was not strong enough to resist the corrupting influences of wealth, luxury, and absolute dominion. The vast difference between the social station and prerogative rights of the priesthood and the people of the other tribes laid the foundation of the monarchy and royal prerogative, which ended in the downfall of the State and the dispersion of the chosen people to the four winds of heaven.

Before such theocratic prerogative power the freedom of the individual Hebrew became a reproach. The people of the tribes were no longer freemen, but slaves of power and prerogative.

The priesthood, the highest office in the State, from whose ranks the high-priest, the chief ruler, was chosen, being confined to a single tribe, the family of Levi, that family thus became the fountain of all honor, power, and profit in the State. This aristocratic feature in the Mosaic constitution finally destroyed the civil liberty of the Jews and overthrew the State, while the changes made in the Mosaic code by this hierarchy for its self-interest uprooted the morality of the Mosaic law, and thus assisted in the final dispersion and ruin of the chosen people.

In this way the attempt of Moses to organize a State constitution for the realization of the highest good, happiness, and freedom of the people of his race resulted in a failure; and the most admirable attempt to form a State organization, based upon the only true principle of a federative republic, wherein every citizen was to be equally protected in his rights, and raised to the highest standard of excellence by an admirably contrived system of sanitary regulations, and

such moral education as the age was capable of after fifteen centuries, finally shattered, from the working out of the principles of latent despotism contained in the hierarchial element introduced into the plan of the republic by its illustrious founder.

It was by reason of the perpetual conflict introduced by this element in the Mosaic code between the laws applied to the people and physical nature, and the prerogative powers of the priesthood, that the civil fabric of the federative republic continued only about four hundred years, from the conquest of Palestine, in the year 1500 B. C., to the establishment of the Hebrew monarchy, in the year 1100 B. C. It was not important to the final failure of the Mosaic code of government whether the high-priest or a king exercised the supreme power; it was this despotic feature of the code itself which eventually, in its results, overthrew the liberties of the people and expelled them from the land of Judea, making them wanderers over the earth ever since.

And yet, in despite of the downfall of his political fabric, what a legislator must that man have been who was able to raise tribes that had sunk down to the lowest condition of slavery, to a moral consciousness and height which has kept the Jews a separate organization to this day! All other historical national bodies have perished; only the Jew has survived. Nay, more: having been for the second time cast down to the lowest depth of degradation, expelled from their native country, and scattered over the world, the Jews have elevated themselves, sheerly by dint of their own moral power and self-consciousness, to a position which compels wonder and admiration. It was the Jew that brought to the illiterate Christians of the West, in the Middle Ages, the lore of the Arabians, their mathematics, and their Aristotelian metaphysics; it was the Jew that dictated to them the terms on which to borrow money, and invented for them the system of banking; it was the Jew that thus gradually raised himself to the supreme power of the European world, the moneypower, controlling even now the destinies of empires; and it is the Jew who has finally, in our day, subdued and made subject to one of his representatives, the Baron von Reuter, that same empire of Persia where his forefathers mourned as captives under the willow-trees, and wept by the rivers of Babylon.

CHAPTER III.

THE GREEK REPUBLICS.

In some way or another, that same element of a prerogative despotism which overthrew the Mosaic State has proved the destruction of every hitherto established form of government. And this of necessity. For, the object of a State organization being to apply laws equally to all citizens, the very conception of a prerogative is at war with the conception of such a State, and must necessarily destroy it and again be destroyed by it. Every political contradiction must die, by its very nature.

In the Judean republic, the most successful of ancient times, it was, as has been shown, the hierarchical element which destroyed the State. The Greek so-called republics are scarcely worthy of political examination. No people had less conception of State organization than that people, which from its own high individual culture needed it, indeed, least; but, it might also be said, needed it most, as a fitting frame and enclosure for the world of beauty which it produced. For, with a fitting government of law, this marvellously gifted people might have achieved results far more extensive than it did achieve, and saved mankind the centuries of retrogression consequent upon the downfall of all forms of government which followed the irruption of the Huns and Goths into Europe.

But the Greeks had an aversion to all fixed form of government, an aversion as great as that of the Indian tribes of our own country, whose political mode of living has indeed an extraordinary resemblance to that of the early Greeks; Agamemnon, for instance, having about all the power, and not a whit more, of an Indian chief. They could not bring themselves to acknowledge a general government of law, in the pride of their individuality, and consequently they perished.

Thus, as the Mosaic government, in its first grand results of raising a tribe of miserable slaves, ignorant, filthy, and lawless in the highest degree, to a condition of remarkable strength, intelligence, and political culture, shows the power, effectiveness, and necessity of a strictly defined State organization, established upon pure principles of reason, so the history of the Greek republics shows us, on

the other hand, the negative of all this, and how the most gifted of all the people of the earth perished necessarily because it disregarded the need of law.

The opposite of the Jews in all respects, the Greek people had formed itself out of all sorts of elements of humanity; contracting no fixed character, no fixed ties of tribe or nationality, but leaving everything free, youthful, and individual. Their ideal is represented in Achilles, the foremost knight of that age; and as in the knightly period of the Middle Ages the crusades formed the first great bond of union for these individual fighters, so the siege of Troy first combined the Hellenes into one people, but without any definite organization and law, each being his own law-giver. This disorganized condition lasted for a long time, and in it the first sign of prerogative showed itself as the cities of Greece rose by commerce and trade to importance and power. For a long time the acquisition of more territory by colonization checked the growth of despotism, as it has done and does now in our country; but the power of money and monopoly, which all trade and commerce, not regulated by wise and just laws, invariably produces, finally asserted itself, and then there arose tyrants in the cities. Moses had purposely prohibited commerce to his own people, and by that measure, as well as by his judicious laws of bankruptcy, made money-despotisms impossible in the State. Sparta was probably the only State in Greece which retained a republican form of government for any length of time, under the laws of Lycurgus, who tried to bring about the same result which Moses effected by his prohibition of commerce and his laws of bankruptcy, in introducing and establishing iron as the only allowable money, and prohibiting the sale of property. This virtually excluded the spirit of commerce from Sparta, and thereby checked the development of moneyed monopolies.

All the other cities of Greece changed from republican forms of government to despotisms alternately, the people heeding little their political combination, nor the laws which were to afford them protection, in which unconcern the establishment of slavery as well as the virtual absence of monogamic family life materially assisted. Art, beauty, culture, and individual independence in the enjoyment of these things, absorbed all the attention of the Greek citizen. was not the law itself, but the tone of voice in which it was announced, the gesture which accompanied its enunciation, that deter

It

mined its acceptance. A finer modulated tone and more expressive and beautiful gesture of another orator caused to-morrow its repeal. Nevertheless, no sooner did the Persian ruler approach, with his terrific army of millions, to crush the world of individual freedom with the weight of Asiatic despotism, than all these reckless, free, gay, and brave young Greeks rushed together as one people, and slew the common enemy in the most momentous conflicts of history. But the Persian wars, in their effects of increasing the wealth of the Grecian cities, particularly of Athens, by the immense contributions exacted from other places, only increased the evil of moneypower and prerogative, making possible the success of so reckless a man as Alcibiades, and gave rise to the wars between the various parts of Greece, whereby all of them finally became the prey of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, who gave them what they had never had: a fixed government and administration of law. But it was too late; and, like Judea, Greece fell into the hands of the most powerful of all State organizations of the Old World, the Roman republic.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ROMAN REPUBLIC.

If the Greek republics collapsed chiefly from want of any fixed State organization, and from the growth of money and monopoly prerogatives, the fall of the Roman republic shows in the most vivid and effective way how the strongest organization is doomed to suffer the same fate from the workings of the latter alone.

Under the old kings, a sort of theocratic-despotic form of government held the Roman people together with iron severity. Monogamic as the Hebrews under the code of Moses, it was the violation of the sanctity of matrimony which roused the Roman people, under the elder Brutus, to expel Tarquin, their last king, and establish a republican form of government, the aristocratic features of which -- in that a class of patricians exercised all political power- soon gave way to the constant pressure exercised on it by the populace; until, after many conflicts, the common people succeeded in securing a system of writ