[HUTTON] i THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 237 
of Sparta: that Sparta to which Thucydides with Plato and all the 
Athenian intellectuals—even Socrates—so fondly turned amid the 
noise and blather, the babbling and bubbling, the blabbering and blub- 
bering of Athenian democracy. 
It is not from Thucydides that we hear that the Periclean ideal 
was impracticable. He certainly implies that it failed; but he does 
not put the blame on Pericles for its failure. He seems to suggest that 
it did not fail as long as Pericles was present to inspire his countrymen 
with his ideals. Periclean Athens to Thucydides is Athens at her 
best. Periclean Athens was nominally a democracy—he writes— 
in reality she was a city governed by her first man (II. 65). 
This is perhaps a sort of Carlylean or Ruskinese hero-worship; 
it is certainly not the expression of a Lincoln-democrat. Government 
for the people was Pericles’ aim. Government by the people was 
hardly even Pericles’ practice, so far as we can judge. And it was cer- 
tainly not Thucydides’ idea of good government. There is, or was, 
a Society of St. Michael, I believe, to which Ruskin and Carlyle 
belonged at least in spirit: a society intended to protest that in politics 
as in religion a man best shows his free will by surrendering it freely 
to the grace given him from above, from a God or a god-like man, 
to whose will he submits himself: after that it is not he who works 
but the grace, the will of the higher nature, which works in him. 
Obedience—a free and willing obedience to such grace—is his salvation. 
Thucydides, I think, belonged to the same school: the very antithesis 
of the modern and characteristic school of the Socialists. ‘‘Enough 
of great men”’ is their cry: “‘nous en avons assez.” “Do not think of 
me, do not magnify me’ said Francisco Ferrer, a genuine and sincere 
martyr to this cause. ‘The future does not depend on individuals 
but on classes and communities: the individual is henceforth nothing. 
He has had his day and ceased to be.” 
I turn from Thucydides’ politics to his religion. A man’s religion, 
says Carlyle, is the most interesting thing about him. It may be so, 
but it is not on that account the most easily discoverable. Herodotus’ 
religion is both interesting and discoverable: the old doctrine of Divine 
Jealousy pushed to its logical conclusion, illustrated with fantastic 
modern instances but relieved by the other Herodotean doctrine— 
the complement of jealousy—of Divine Compensation: the same 
God who puts down the mighty from their seat is careful to exalt the 
humble and the meek, and to see that the meek and not the mighty 
inherit the earth: (that the French Canadians and not our ambitious 
and exacting race populate Ontario). There is nothing so picturesque 
and definite as this in Thucydides’ religion. It is much nearer the 
sombre creed of Tacitus, when he claimed to have produced evidence 
