The failure to recognize this distinction has led to much misunderstanding and shallow thinking in attempts to apply Greek ideas and maxims too literally to modern life. It is only too common to hear Englishmen, whose knowledge of politics and history, outside the newspapers, is confined to stray reminiscences from a not very ardent pursuit of the classics in their school and college days, basing confident predictions of the failure of modern democracy on some _obiter dictum_ of Thucydides or Plato and assessing the fate of the British Commonwealth in terms borrowed from some judgement of Sallust or Tacitus on its wholly different Roman prototype. It is flippancy or pedantry like this which gives rise to the onslaughts of a Cobden or Herbert Spencer or an H. G. Wells and to the practical man's suspicion of a classical education. One might as well go to last year's market reports for guidance in a business deal of to-day as have recourse to Plato, or, for that matter, to Macchiavelli, in an existing political emergency. If a classical education, designed as it is in England to promote 'character' rather than 'intellect' (a vicious distinction which leaves no room for such a quality as intellectual integrity) often leaves behind it but a meagre residuum of knowledge and ideas, it should at least cause the public school man of yesterday and the London clubman of to-day to realize the limitations of his field of study and to abstain from confident political generalization. The Labour M.P. who once remarked to the writer, _à propos_ of an Indian debate, that he had been in the House just long enough to know that all he knew about India was that he knew nothing about it, had been brought up, if not in a better at least in a cannier school. There is no sounder training for the student of politics and history, or indeed of any serious subject, than to know everything about something, whether it be the chronological order of Plato's dialogues or the problem of humidity in weaving-sheds, or about placing a field or keeping a wicket. That is why the Duke of Wellington who, if he lacked the intellectuality of a Foch, at least knew both his England and his own job of military science, selected the playing fields rather than the classical classrooms of Eton as the home and training-ground of that concentrated and disinterested endeavour of mind and spirit which had carried his army through patient years of effort to victory. It is all to the good that our classical devotees, faced with criticism and competition from many quarters, should be acquiring both a greater humility and a greater seriousness. Our first caution then, is that Greek political thought is both national and universal, and that we must learn to distinguish what pertains to nationality from what pertains to government.