so far as their political views were concerned, to have regarded anarchy as the greatest evil, because man can not exist without social order. They held that everything depended on the relation between the governing and the governed; that the former should be not only prudent but mild; and that the latter should not only obey, but love their magistrates; that it was necessary to grow accustomed, even in boyhood, to regard order and harmony as beautiful and useful, disorder and confusion as hateful and injurious. They were not blindly attached to a single form of government, but insisted that there should be no unlawful tyranny. Where a regal government existed, kings should be subject to the laws, and act only as the chief magistrates. They regarded a {68} mixed constitution as the best, and where the administration rested principally in the hands of the upper class, they reserved a share of it for the people. The writings of the Pythagoreans commanded high prices, but gained political importance only so far as they contributed to the education of distinguished men, of whom Epaminondas was one.[75] Another scion of these methods of secret instruction, wherein, however, religion was the engine of political power, came from the ancient Assyrian stock with Phoenician emigration to Great Britain. The DRUIDS controlled the learning of that country in religion as in science; and by their mysteries exerted an overwhelming influence upon the rulers and the masses. Dr. Parsons[76] says, what were the filids, and bards, and the Druids, but professors of the sciences among the Gomerians, and Magogians or Scythians, and it is plain that, from Phenius downward, there were always, in every established kingdom among the Scythians, philosophers and wise men, who, at certain times, visited the Greek sages, after they had found their schools? It is no easy matter to point out the first rise and ages of the Druids. They taught the same opinions of the renovated state of the earth, and of souls, with the Magi. According to Caesar, in his time these Druids instructed their youth in the {69} nature and motion of the stars, in the theory of the earth, its magnitude, and of the world, and in the power of the immortal gods. On the continent of Europe, he says, the Druids grew into such power and ascendency over the minds of the people, that even the kings themselves paid an implicit slavish obedience to their dictates; insomuch, that their armies were brave in battle, or abject enough to decline even the most advantageous prospects of success, according to the arbitrary prognostics of this set of religious tyrants; and their decisions became at last peremptory in civil, as well as in the affairs of religion. One of the kings of Ireland, the learned _Carmac o' Quin_, great in law and philosophy, who was not afraid to inveigh openly against the corruptions and superstition of the Druids, and maintained, in his disputations against