But, while this golden currency was circulating through Greece, enriching its mind and augmenting its chances of independence and happiness, a race of men sprang up, who brought into use a number of ingenious and beautiful counters,—I mean the sophists.[808] The influence of these men in the education of the Greeks has seldom been correctly appreciated. It has been more common to vituperate than to study them. They corrupted, we are told, the mind and manners of youth. But how? No one, as far as I know, has observed that to them is to be traced the extinction of the republican spirit and the opening of a way for despotism.[809] That they created the yearning after innovation I will not affirm; but their epoch constituted a period of transition from republican to monarchical institutions, and the only way in which they can be said to have corrupted the youth was by undermining that love of liberty and of country, the feeling of disinterestedness on which chiefly a commonwealth must be founded, and inculcating in lieu thereof a system of ethics more in conformity with the modifications of civil polity prevalent in modern times. In this way only did they corrupt and undermine the morals of their country. But in so far they effected it, and that the more easily, in that circumstances conspired, about the time they arose, to fling the whole business of teaching into their hands, insomuch that to be a sophist, and to teach youth, grew to be synonymous terms.[810] Footnote 808: Vid. Herod. i. 29. And Cf. Schœll. Hist. de la Lit. Grecq. ii. 134. Isoc. de Perm. § 26. Muret. in Arist. Ethic. p. 477. Menag. ad Diog. Laert. p. 5. a. b. &c. Footnote 809: Hobbes, the great representative of this class of men in modern times, living under the despotism of the Stuarts, sought to turn the tables upon the philosophers, and accused them of corrupting the minds of youth. “As to rebellion, in particular against monarchy, one of the most frequent causes of it is the reading of the books of policy and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans; from which young men, and all others that are unprovided of the antidote of solid reason, receiving a strong and delightful impression of the great exploits of war, achieved by the conductors of their armies, receive withal a pleasing idea of all they have done besides; and imagine their great prosperity not to have proceeded from the emulation of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular form of government.”—Leviathan, pt. ii. c. 29. vol. iii. p. 315.—Edition of Sir William Molesworth. Footnote 810: Poll. iv. 17.