refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of Carlyle:-- Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff King--there did not society exist without those two vital elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. _Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national religion as Carlyle. [Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows disrespect to the State Religion.]