POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS PRELIMINARY. 3 



as we may from the thought of those immolations of prisoners which 

 have, tens of thousands of times, followed battles between wild 

 tribes ; read as we do with horror of the pyramids of heads and the 

 whitening bones of slain peoples left by barbarian invaders ; hate, as 

 we ought, the militant spirit which is even now among ourselves 

 prompting base treacheries and brutal aggressions we must not let 

 our feelings blind us to the proofs we meet with, that intersocial con- 

 flicts have furthered the development of social structures. 



Moreover, dislikes to governments of certain kinds must not pre- 

 vent us from seeing their fitnesses to their circumstances. Though 

 rejecting the common idea of glory, and declining to join soldiers 

 and schoolboys in applying the epithet " great " to conquering des- 

 pots, we detest despotism ; though we regard their sacrifices of their 

 own peoples and of alien peoples in pursuit of universal dominion as 

 gigantic crimes we must yet recognize the benefits occasionally aris- 

 ing from the social consolidations they achieve. Neither the massa- 

 cres of subjects which Roman emperors directed, nor the assassinations 

 of relatives habitual among potentates in the East, nor the impover- 

 ishment of whole nations by the excessive exactions of tyrants, must 

 so prejudice us as to prevent appreciation of the benefits which have, 

 under cei'tain conditions, resulted from the unlimited power of the 

 supreme man. Nor must the remembrances of torturing implements, 

 and oubliettes, and victims built into walls, shut out from our minds 

 the evidence that abject submission of the weak to the strong, how- 

 ever unscrupulously enforced, has in some times and places been ne- 

 cessary. 



So, too, Avith the associated ownership of man by man. Absolute 

 condemnation of slavery must be withheld, even if we accept the tra- 

 dition repeated by Herodotus, that to build the Great Pyramid relays 

 of a hundred thousand slaves toiled for twenty years ; or even if we 

 find it true that, of the serfs compelled to work at the building of St. 

 Petersburg, three hundred thousand perished. Though aware that the 

 unrecorded sufferings of men and women held in bondage are beyond 

 imagination, we must, nevertheless, preserve a mental state receptive 

 of such evidence as there may be that benefits have resulted. 



In brief, trustworthy interpretations of social arrangements imply 

 an almost passionless consciousness. Though feeling can not and 

 ought not to be excluded from the mind when otherwise contemplating 

 them, yet it ought to be excluded when contemplating them as natural 

 phenomena to be understood in their causes and effects. 



Maintenance of this mental attitude will be furthered by keej^ing 

 before ourselves the truth that in human actions the absolutely bad 

 may be relatively good, and the absolutely good may be relatively 

 bad. 



Though it has become a commonplace that the institutions under 



