geiton, A. 776: 'Since, then, it is acknowledged that, next to the gods, it is the laws which preserve the Commonwealth, you should act, all of you, in the same manner as if you were sitting here to make up a club subscription. Him that obeys the laws, you should praise and honor, as a person contributing his full share to the welfare of his country; him that disobeys them, you should punish.' Dem. ag. Meidias 224-5: 'What is the strength of the laws? If any of you is injured and cries out, will they run to the rescue and help him? No; they are but written words and they are not able to do this. In what, then, is the power of the laws? In your enforcing them and making them effectual for those who need them. You should defend them just the same as you would defend yourselves against injustice, and regard the wrongs of the laws, by whomsoever they are committed, as matters of public concern. And there should be no services, no compassion, no influence, no contrivance, nothing whatsoever by which a man who has transgressed the laws can escape the penalty.' Aesch. ag. Ctes. 36: 'When the laws are guarded, the democracy is preserved.' Deinarchus ag. Dem. 72: 'Men of Athens, why do you think cities fare now well and now ill? You will find nothing else the cause than their counsellors and leaders.' But the philosophers are more radical, and the remedy they find is in education. 'The greatest safeguard for the permanence of any polity,' says Aristotle, Pol. VIII, c. 9, 'is one which is universally disregarded at present, viz. the education of the citizens in the spirit of the polity. For the wisest of the laws are of no avail, unless the citizens are trained by habit and education in the lines of the polity.' The Athenian democracy, on the testimony of their own writers, seems to show the same tendencies and to have the same dangers that we find in our own country, only here on a larger scale and with innumerable complications, and so the word of warning from that little city-state with its luminous thinkers may well be heeded. In the words of Plato, Rep. 521: If men go into the administration of public affairs beggars and hungering after their own advantage, thinking that from this source they are to snatch the chief good, the state can never be well governed, for then office becomes an object of strife and the factions that ensue will ruin themselves and the whole state as well.' The great danger to any democracy is, as Arnold says, "the danger that comes from the multitude being in power, with no adequate ideal to elevate or guide the multitude" (Democracy, p. 20). The safeguard lies in education, the education that is fundamental, that develops, as Plato teaches, the whole man, physically, intellectually and morally, and stamps ineffaceable ideals upon the heart and mind. But all are not capable of the highest attainments, as Plato believes, and he solemnly urges the recognition of inequality, and divides men allegorically into those with gold in their hearts; second, with silver; and third, with only brass and iron; and he insists that the only hope for the state is when the highly endowed by Nature, who have received the noblest culture, are the leaders and rulers. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, p. 174, pronounces "the belief, whether express or tacit, that any one man is as good as any other, almost as detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence as any effect which most forms of government can produce." And Giddings, in Democracy and Empire, pp. 212 and 213, says: "Differences of mental ability and of moral power will always exist among men; and by a law that is absolute in the realm of mind as the law of gravitation is in the physical world, inferior men will continue to defer to their superiors, to believe dicta instead of thinking propositions and to imitate examples instead of originating them. Leadership of some kind men must and will have." And the problem for all time is how, on the one hand, to train those into noble living and thinking upon whom Nature herself has put the stamp of greatness, and, on the other, to train the people into a desire to have such men as their rulers and leaders; but instead of trying to solve this problem, Plato, Rep. 493 B, says the would-be statesmen consider statesmanship or, rather, practical politics to be 'a study of the disposition and desires of the great strong beast, the people; when to approach him and touch him, and when he is fiercest and gentlest, and from what causes, and by what sounds he is tamed or enraged, and so, without any true knowledge of the noble and base, good and evil, just and unjust, by virtue of this experience, they name everything according to the humors of the great beast, calling that good in which he delights and that bad with which he is displeased.' An admirable picture of the ear-to-the-ground political leader or the one with his finger on the people's pulse! "Herbert Spencer," says Lecky, in Democracy and Liberty, p. 226, "has said with profound truth and wisdom that the end which the statesman should keep in view as higher than all other ends, is the formation of character. It is on this side," he adds, "that democratic politics seem to me peculiarly weak." "The great peril of Hellas was the selfish blindness of political leaders" (Lloyd, Age of Perikles, p. 401). Ekklesiazusae 174: 'For I see the state always employing bad leaders, and if any be good for one day, he is bad for ten.' 'As all the functions (of government),' says Aristotle, Pol., b. VI, c. 4, 'ought to be discharged, and nobly and justly discharged, in a state, it is indispensable that there should be also a class of public men endowed with virtue.' Plato, Rep. 374: 'The good take office not with the feeling that they are entering upon something good or that they will have enjoyment in holding it, but as something necessary and because they are not able to entrust it to any better than themselves, or even as good.' In other words, they take office as a trust and their "thoughts shoot beyond the vulgar white of personal aims." "The end of the state," says Lilly, First Principles in Politics, p. 51, "is what Aristotle calls e Câv, noble or worthy life. The roots of human progress are probity, honour, the capacity of self-sacrifice, the subordination to high ideals." And the last word shall be Plato's, Rep. 499-500: 'O my friend, do not attack the multitude. They will hold a different opinion if, not in a contentious spirit but with a view to soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you show them what you mean by philosophers and describe their character and profession. But a man who in word and work is perfectly moulded, as far as he can be, into the proportion and likeness of virtue such a man, ruling in a city of the same character, they have never yet seen, neither one nor many of them-do you think they ever did?' ABBY LEACH. II. THE OCEAN IN SANSKRIT EPIC POETRY. Touching on this point in a previous paper in the nineteenth volume of this Journal, I noticed that both the epics of India referred to "ships wrecked at sea." The question whether the great poet of the Rāmāyaṇa refers to the ocean resolves itself, to my mind, into the question whether the Rāmāyaṇa was written by the great poet to whom it is attributed or by another Homer with the same name. If it is admitted that we do not know which parts of the extant epic are genuine, then we have no means of determining whether to Valmiki the ocean was "entirely unknown," and this factor in the discussion of the relative antiquity of the two epics is not important. If, on the other hand, we accept the parts of the epic unanimously recorded in the different versions of the text as the work of Valmiki, then it is difficult to see why we should refuse to credit that sainted poet with a knowledge of the ocean. Granting so much, however, I should myself restrict the probable expression of this knowledge to the cases (just mentioned) where the texts agree, and therefore conclude that, though Valmiki shows acquaintance with the ocean and with ocean-phenomena, the descriptions in the extant epic have been multiplied by later imitators. In this paper I refrain from further polemical discussion of the subject, my object being merely to give a picture of the ocean as described by both epics, by the epic attributed to Vālmīki, and by Valmiki himself, in so far as a distinction is possible between the last two. Only in the case of two items I should like to add here a note to the matter of my former paper. First it is possible that the reason why Vālmīki employs the device of a dike to get the army across from India to Ceylon may be that given in the great epic at iii. 283, 28. As the numbers to be transported are here asañkhyeya, 'beyond computation,' çl. 9, it is said with some show of reason that "there are not ships enough,” nāvo na santi senāyā bahvyas tarayitum tatha. This may be implied in G. (Gorresio) v. 92, 9, where the speaker recommends having recourse to Ocean's benevolence as the only means of transporting the army, "considering that Rama's army is so large," (iti me vartate buddhiḥ) dṛṣṭvā Rāma-balam mahat, which is not expressly put forward here in the alternate text, though both versions give numbers that suggest the same reason, crores and crores of soldiers being counted, the number running into quintillions and sexillions. The second reason given in the Mahābhārata—that the confiscation for military purposes of all the ships and boats would be detrimental to trade (a course opposed to the policy of a wise ruler, vaṇijām upaghātaṁ ca katham asmadvidhaç caret, loc. cit.)—may be mentioned as a curiosity. The second item to be added to the former paper is a query whether 'Nala's Bridge' is not a misnomer if we make a distinction between a bridge above and a dike in the water. "Whatever is put into the water I will hold together" or "The setu I will hold," dhārayiṣyāmi, R. vi. 22, 42; M. 283, 42, does not imply a bridge. The sea is in fact filled up rather than built over, sāgaraṁ samapūrayan, R. vi. 22, 53 (compare 'ocean filled with rocks,' vi. 30, 11, where the same verb), and the mass is bound together, babandhuḥ, G. v. 95, 17, with vines and creepers (so M. 148, 10). Hence na vişeduḥ in the description of G. v. 95, 15 means not the peaks, rocks, trees, and rubbish, "did not sink," but that they "did not separate." Setu, as far as I know, is in both epics always a causeway or dike that forms a bridge only by appearing like a dam above the water, its usual purpose being, however, to prevent river-water from progressing. Thus the setu of law firm on its maryādā or bounding limit is a dike which causes the river of virtue to rise to full flood, xii. 299, II. But in G. v. 76, 21, in just such an image of the sea, the same verb as that above is used: "By thee alone, being virtuous, this people running into lawlessness is restrained, dharyate, as is the ocean by a dike," setune 'va mahodadhiḥ. It is then just the word to characterize the wall built by Nala from India to Ceylon, the rocks seen to-day being all there is left of the dike, which was originally raised to the surface and filled in (it was ten leagues wide and one hundred long) with rubbish of every sort. The river-dike is illustrated in a proverb found at xiii. 35, 20, where occurs the same word, implying that the dike holds : açakyaṁ spraṣṭum ākāçam acālyo Himavān giriḥ 1 Compare on these incredible and almost uncountable numbers, Weber, Ind. Streif. I, p. 97. |