From the cave-dweller, the aboriginal savage, have been evolved Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Milton, Dante, Newton, Gladstone, Pascal, La Place, Lincoln, Emerson, Channing, Martineau, Thomas a' Kempis, Phillips Brooks, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. How magnificent the ascent! How glorious the progression!
Man, once the companion of the Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime,
has flowered into an intellectual, reasoning, moral being—"how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god."
All this progress, however, has cost its price. Step by step has the race advanced from primeval animalism to its present status. It has walked with bleeding feet. The Divine economy works in many ways. One of its ways is to educate, stimulate and spiritualize through antagonism and pain. All faculties, functions and potencies must be worked in order that they may grow. Atrophy, decay, death, are the resultant of non-use. The sullen earth was to be fertilized by man's sweat and blood before it would yield any increase beyond its spontaneous productions. Conflict with the elements, conquest over the lower organisms; ages of toilsome effort, were to come before man was able "to dress the earth and keep it." Out of the iron necessities of his being came initial progress; and progress once begun has never ceased.
The great factor in progress was Co-operation. One man alone can do little. The moment human necessities were recognized, the law of association applied. Man needed man. The family group, the clan, the tribe, the town, the city, the state, the nation, have been stages in the process of closer and closer co-operation.
Confederation, association, combination, require adjustment, compromise, regulation. Hence the germ of government. To live together each man must give way in something to the other. Man is gregarious; he is naturally social; instinctively he availed himself of the companionship of other men. The social status, the foedera generis humani, were slowly evolved from the increasing demands of man upon man; they were not the result of bargaining. What a magnificent drama; the world, the theatre; all mankind, emerging from primitive ignorance, the actors. How many or how long the acts were, we know not; but through "that duration which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment," the wonderful scenes moved on. Out of the strong came forth sweetness. From brute selfishness, from animal passion, came love. Slowly the central idea was reached, and, in the sublime language of the Scripture, man became a living soul! and his body became the temple of the Holy Spirit; his consciousness a part of the infinite consciousness; his personality a world-copy of a divine universe. Reason, conscious, love, were his dower.
The curtain has not yet fallen, and will never fall, upon the last act. We live in a world which is always in process. Nature's genesis is unceasing. "Without haste, without rest," her creative and re-creative processes are always operating.
When one undertakes to talk about government he is drawn instinctively to some historic models. As thinking persons realized in every age the insufficiency of contemporaneous governments, there has scarcely been a time when the academic reformer was wanting. Certain ages may have lacked poets—ours is said to be unpoetic and prosaic, and to await its poet-prophet—but the academic idealist who could say, Go to, let us build a government, has been generally at hand. The dreams of the illuminated ones who have sought, by rule and theory, to make the crooked straight, to convert mankind into angels by legal enactment, are among the most pleasing, if abortive, works of genius. Some of the noblest spirits of the race have made this illusory effort.
Plato, that splendid genius, in whose brain was wrapped the subtle essence which gave to Hellenic art and literature their incomparable charm, found a congenial theme in painting his ideal Republic. It was a beautiful attempt to develop a state based upon Socratic thought. He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out. Plato could not escape the Time-Spirit. The Platonic Republic was his Athens idealized. "The very age and body of the time" gave to the philosopher's dream its form and pressure. The actual Hellenic Republics were not based upon the rights of man; a few ruled over a nation of proletariats and slaves. When they came into rough contact with the vigorous Roman civilization, they were shattered like iridescent bubbles. Even so wise-browed a philosopher as Plato failed to recognize sufficiently the human element. His imaginary republic was air-drawn, fantastic; a philosophic dream, with little grasp on life's realities. It was not broad-based. It did not recognize sufficiently the law of growth. It had no place in our work-a-day world. It interests us now chiefly from the superb literary skill with which it was constructed; a prodigy of intellect and art. But it was not the Democratic Ideal.
Aristotle—that other imperial Greek genius, whom Dante called "the master of those that know;" who had less imaginative mysticism than Plato, but a stronger hold on realities; whose fertile genius touched almost every subject that came within ancient thought—tried his hand also in political science. As a forerunner of modern science, as a profound thinker, he has been a tremendous factor in the intellectual life of the world. But the Time-Spirit held him in its grasp even more firmly than it did Plato. His theory of the state avoided, indeed, the absurdity of communism, but recognized slavery and the subjection of women. Like many of the modern Socialists, he denounced the taking of interest for the use of money. Such political theories must needs be ineffective. They ignore the equitable basis of society and indicate a short-sightedness that is amazing, in any era when thrift, industry and property rights are elements in the life of a state—as they were then and are now. Among the school-men of the middle ages, Aristotle was regnant. His hand has not yet been lifted from our university life. Vast literatures had their birth in his philosophic system. His political theories have become only academic. The world had no use for them. He was far from the Democratic Ideal. No one will deny that Plato and Aristotle are among those