I think it is Bayle who says of Cicero that his religion was in his heart and not in his mind, that it was an instinct of his nature, with which his philosophical theories had nothing to do. Cicero's philosophy, though it has had millions of readers who knew little or nothing of its source, did not profess to be original. He derived it from Plato, or from Socrates, or from both. Greek metaphysics, Greek ethics, Greek thought in general, culminated after the political power of Greece, or at least of Athens, had already begun to decline. Upon the contemporaries of Socrates, still more upon the younger generation of his illustrious disciple, the orthodox religion, the religion of the State, had ceased to exercise any practical influence. Men were philosophers, or they were pure materialists, unless indeed they were one and the other at the same time. The main interest of such books as Miss Harrison's, except for highly cultivated specialists like herself, is the help they give us in the study of literature and art. Even in the Platonic age this was not far from the truth. That part of the case against Socrates which charged him with undermining the foundations of faith would have been perfectly accurate if they had not been already undermined. People do not like to be reminded of the difference between their theory and their practice, or to be told that they have ceased sincerely to hold the doctrines they have inherited by tradition. If few verdicts are more difficult to justify, few are less difficult to understand than the condemnation of Socrates. Of later ages, when Christians burnt each other because they believed too much or too little, it has been well asked and answered 'Who lights the fagot? 'Tis not the firm faith, but the lurking doubt.' The jury who found Socrates to be an atheist were probably sceptics to a man. So were the men, if the story be true, who procured the banishment of Euripides. Different as these two men of genius were in their views of life, and in their comparative estimate of human affairs, they agreed in their use of the popular religion. They both employed it to illustrate and adorn, to supply examples which would be understood, to give local colour. Plato, though he constantly attacked Homer as the fount and origin of an immoral habit, a habit of mingling truth with falsehood under the glamour of eloquence and verse, could not get away from him, and quoted him as men of all opinions now quote the Bible, because everyone will recognise the quotation. Euripides taught his moral by means of a mythology which all his hearers, and all his readers, think what they might of it, knew by heart, just as St. Paul laid hold of the admission that there were Athenians who worshipped an unknown God.

In that marvellous dialogue, the Gorgias, of which not the least wonderful feature is that it was written four hundred years before Christ, the examples of Tantalus, and Tityus, and Sisyphus are put forward to show that kings and princes and dictators are punished beyond the grave on a scale proportionate to their offences. Just as

St. James told the rich men to weep and howl for the miseries that were come upon them, so Plato or his master picked out the great and mighty upon earth for the future punishment which Homer borrowed from the Orphic creed. Private persons, such as Thersites, have not, Socrates remarks, been depicted as undergoing these torments, because luckily for them they had not the opportunity of committing great crimes. They were not, therefore, as Jowett says, counted worthy of eternal damnation. In the Gorgias, Socrates seems to accept for the sake of the argument the authority of Homer, which in the Republic he repudiates altogether. If poets were regarded as moral teachers, or faithful historians, they were a danger to the State. But they were valuable as witnesses to that common opinion of mankind which they followed even when they seemed to lead it. Such appears to have been the general attitude of the Platonic Socrates towards the mythology of the poets. There is, however, a curious and interesting exception. The passage in the Odyssey which describes Minos bearing his golden sceptre, and giving laws to the dead, is quoted by Socrates in the Gorgias with all seriousness as the embodiment of a solemn reality. He is convinced, he says, of its truth, and he so orders his life that he may present his soul in all possible purity to Minos, the judge. These, he adds, are regarded as old wives' fables by enlightened young men like Callicles and Polus and Gorgias, whom he is addressing. Yet, though they are the wisest of living Greeks they have nothing better to propound than the stories they reject. He is not seriously arguing, he would be the last man to argue, that Orphism, or any other theology, must be adopted by every man who cannot provide a substitute. He did not believe in the divine origin of the Odyssey. He asks how this doctrine of future retribution came into existence, and he answers that it testifies to an indwelling sentiment of the human mind. The more purely human it is, the stronger his case becomes. The outward signs and symbols of earthly greatness, the pomp of power, and the apparent impunity with which it is abused; the cynical indifference of tyrants like Archelaus to everything except their own interests and their own pleasure; the oppression of the good, the triumph of the wicked, the open and successful appeal to force as stronger than justice all these things excuse, or at least explain, the blunt assertion of Callicles that might is right, or, as the modern blasphemer put it, that God is always on the side of the strongest battalions. 'Yes,' says Socrates, that may be all very well. You account, or you think you have accounted, for the superficial aspect of things. But how do you explain these stories of Minos, and Eacus and Rhadamanthus ; of the stone, and the sieve, and the wheel? Homer did not invent them. They are forms of the universal belief, which no cynical paradoxes will ever expel from the human mind, that the difference between right and wrong is eternal, that it is more blessed to be the victim than the author of injustice.' That the

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wisdom of this world is foolishness with God might be called the text or motto of the Gorgias. The problems with which it deals are for the most part simple and elementary. When Callicles looked at the little tyrants of Greek or Sicilian cities, and saw that they came in no misfortune like other folk, neither were plagued like other men, he drew the inference which was not new then, and is not old now, that it was wisest for each man to imitate them in his own sphere. Socrates was not content with vanquishing him in argument. He took him into the kingdom of Minos, that he might understand the end of these men. That was the use he made of Greek religion. Himleast restrained, by his 'dæmonic' conscience, he appealed to popular mythology, not as evidence of facts, but as an indication of certain tendencies in the human mind. If, as Miss Harrison says, 'the last word in ancient Greek religion was said by the Orphics,' it was capable of being moulded by the hands of philosophical genius into the austere and sublime morality which made Theætetus exclaim, 'If you could persuade all men, Socrates, of what you say, as you persuade me, there would be more peace and less evil in the world.'

self guided, or at

HERBERT PAUL.

BEHIND THE FISCAL VEIL

'Look where you will in this England of ours, you will everywhere find signs of an abounding and increasing prosperity.' Thus Lord Rosebery, if correctly reported, when discussing Mr. Chamberlain's proposals at Leicester last November. Similar words have during the last eight months fallen from the lips of scores of other speakers engaged on a similar errand. They will doubtless be heard again within the walls of the Parliament now about to assemble.

When such utterances get into print and are read by cosy firesides, they diffuse a pleasing sense of complacency, which it seems cruel to disturb. But the question is, Are they true? The Liberal politician of to-day unhesitatingly says 'Yes.' The Tory of to-day, in unison with that detached group which cares little for the rise and fall of parties and party-leaders, will, as unhesitatingly, say 'No.'

Fiscal problems have of late bulked so largely on platforms and in the press as to throw all else into the shade. Debated, as they have been, mainly in the interests of our manufacturers and artisans, they have drawn away public attention from the condition of British agriculture, and from the still more distressful case of that residual deposit of our large towns, which literally knows not, when it rises in the morning, where it will lay its head at night or how it will sustain life during the day. It is time to lift this fiscal veil and see things as they really are.

One of the lessons enforced by the serious thinkers of the Victorian era, and, in particular, by the great synthetic philosopher who died last December, is that society, like life, is an organism, with mutually related, interdependent parts. This is now a generally accepted axiom. It follows that, just as we cannot truthfully say the physical body is healthy when one of its members is suffering from gangrene, so we cannot truthfully say the body politic is prosperous when, at the heart of it, there are symptoms of malignant disease.

The optimism of Lord Rosebery and his friends will be seen to be not a little delusive when we consider what is going on simultaneously in our rural districts on the one hand, and in our large towns on the other.

It is common knowledge that British agriculture has been on the 255

down grade for the last thirty years, and that in some counties it is practically ruined. This has not been due to bad seasons. When a bad season occurs, the disasters it brings seldom persist throughout the whole of the twelve months. A spring drought, followed by copious autumn rains, may cause a falling off in the yield of corn and hay, and yet consist with an abundant crop of turnips and swedes. This occurred in 1893. Again, a favourable spring and summer may be succeeded by excessive drought in the late autumn. In that case, the hay and corn crops may be good and well harvested, whilst the root crops may turn out a complete failure. This occurred in 1899. When, as in 1903, the corn crops and root crops are each damaged in their turn, the event is so exceptional that, to match it, farmers have to go back to 1879. The resemblance is not complete, for in many respects 1879 was a worse year than 1903. The one satisfactory reflection is that the two seasons so compared are a whole generation apart.

For the chronic causes of agricultural distress we must look further afield than to the caprices of the weather. What these causes are will appear by attending to a few facts gathered from the statistical tables published by the Board of Agriculture.

During the Crimean War, when our population was only 27,000,000, we produced nearly all our own food. Now, with a population of 41,000,000, we import three-fourths of our food, because our farmers have, in the interval, laid down to grass land on which it no longer pays them to grow wheat. In 1876 the yield of British wheat was 18,000,000 quarters, which, selling as it then did at fifty shillings a quarter, gives a value of 45,000,000l. In 1901 the yield was 6,500,000 quarters, which, selling as it then did at twenty-eight shillings and tenpence a quarter, gives a value of 9,000,000l.-exactly onefifth of the previous value. Comparing the year 1902 (it would not be fair to take 1903) with the average of the quinquennial period 1871-75, there was a decrease in the cultivated area of British green crops of over four-fifths of a million of acres.

Along with the diminution of our crop area, there has been a diminution of our live stock, indicating, as the Board of Agriculture point out, a decrease of farmer's capital.'

This double shrinkage of crops and stock alike has, as an inevitable consequence, entailed a considerable shrinkage of agricultural employment. Notwithstanding that in the last thirty years the population has increased by 10,000,000, the census returns show the falling off of the number of persons under the heading agriculturals' to have been 435,000 for England and Wales, or over 8 per cent. Comparing 1901 with 1881-an interval of twenty years-the Board of Trade Blue Book shows a decrease of agriculturals' of over 211,000, whereas, having regard to the increase of population, there should have been, if agriculture had not declined, an increase of 300,000.