(5.) Because, no doubt, a certain excitement of the public mind arising out of the troubles of the recent revolutionary government established by the Spartans, and the restoration of the democracy by Thrasybulus, was favourable to the bringing of a charge against a person belonging to a class generally suspected by the people, and one who had unquestionably at times spoken his mind freely enough on the defects, absurdities, and blunders of the local democracy. This political element may certainly have helped; but the charge against the philosopher was not mainly--formally indeed not at all--political, as the pleadings both in Xenophon and Plato sufficiently show. Taking all these things together, remembering how many follies and ferocities have everywhere been perpetrated in the name of religion, and impressed with the full force of what the poet says of the reward wont to be paid by the world to persistent speakers of truth-- “Die wenigen die von der Wahrheit was erkannt Und thöricht genug ihr volles Herz nicht wahrten Dem Pöbel ihr Gefühl, ihr Schauen offenbarten Hat man von je gekreuzigt und verbrannt,”-- {111} some persons may perhaps feel inclined to think with Mr. Grote that “the wonder rather is that the wise man was not prosecuted sooner. It was only the extraordinary toleration of the Greek people that prevented this.” There is a great amount of truth in this remark; but the exercise of polytheistic toleration in the case of Socrates was rendered more easy by the undoubted innocency of the accused, and the host of friends whom his wisdom and goodness had created for him as his champions. Had Socrates really been as heterodox in Athenian theology as Michael Servetus was in the theology of the Christian world at the period when, in harmony with universal European law, he was burnt by the Genevese Calvinists, we might then have drawn a contrast between monotheistic intolerance and polytheistic toleration in two perfectly similar cases; but as matters really stand, while the execution of Servetus was only a great legal and theological mistake, the death of Socrates must be stamped by the impartial historian as a great social crime. It was equally against local law and human right, a rude invasion of blind prejudice, overbearing insolence, and paltry spite against the holiest sanctities of human life. The details of the death of Socrates, sketched with such graceful power and kindly simplicity by Plato in the concluding chapters of the _Phædo_, are well known; but the present paper would seem imperfect without some glimpse of that last and most beautiful scene of the philosopher’s career. We shall therefore conclude with that extract; and to make the picture of his last days as complete as possible, introduce it by an extract from Plato’s _Apology_, in which the dignified self-reliance and serene courage of the sage {112} is described with all that rich fulness and easy grace of which the writer was so consummate a master:--