grand
outlines of political truth which we have found in the Sacred Books, and
carry us forward to the latest teaching of our most enlightened
contemporaries, would bear a good deal of elucidation and comment.
Heraclitus is, unfortunately, so obscure that Socrates could not
understand him, and I won't pretend to have succeeded better.

If the topic of my address was the history of political science, the
highest and the largest place would belong to Plato and Aristotle. The
_Laws_ of the one, the _Politics_ of the other, are, if I may trust my
own experience, the books from which we may learn the most about the
principles of politics. The penetration with which those great masters
of thought analysed the institutions of Greece, and exposed their vices,
is not surpassed by anything in later literature; by Burke or Hamilton,
the best political writers of the last century; by Tocqueville or
Roscher, the most eminent of our own. But Plato and Aristotle were
philosophers, studious not of unguided freedom, but of intelligent
government. They saw the disastrous effects of ill-directed striving for
liberty; and they resolved that it was better not to strive for it, but
to be content with a strong administration, prudently adapted to make
men prosperous and happy.

Now liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are
excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to
a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is
not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required,
but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society,
and of private life. Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes
promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard
useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the
boundaries of Empire. It might be plausibly argued that, if many things
would be worse in England or Ireland under an intelligent despotism,
some things would be managed better; that the Roman Government was more
enlightened under Augustus and Antoninus than under the Senate, in the
days of Marius or of Pompey. A generous spirit prefers that his country
should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than
powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a
humble commonwealth in the Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond
the narrow frontier, than a subject of the superb aut