244 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
merely a matter of circumstance, condition and opportunity or— 
lack of opportunity; which is no special virtue in the aristocrats but 
the natural result of their interests and their advantages, and therefore 
all the more useful and punctual, just because it is not dependent on 
the off chance of real virtue but is a natural product of conditions; 
is it a sort of natural compensation, I say, that this man who could 
see his way before him so little, who is so dubious of human effort, 
should at least conceive so confident a belief in Fate and in his power 
to read Fate? 
It may beso. Nature abhors a vacuum. Some Faith a man must 
have obviously to write history at all: and if no other, then faith in 
fate and in the reign of laws which can be deciphered and interpreted; 
let it be counted to Thucydides for righteousness that he sometimes 
manages to anticipate the future so closely. 
Again, is it a contradiction to be so impersonal and fatalistic and 
yet to desire the government of a State by its chosen spirits, by the 
elect, by a Pericles, when a Pericles is born at long intervals to guide 
a State? 
I do not think so. Thucydides believed in fate: even in democracy 
as a result of fate, as an inevitable and disagreeable product at a certain 
stage of culture when universal education has made all questions open 
questions and has destroyed the rule of convention and old-established 
aristocracy. He disliked democracy as government from the street, 
as government without reflection, without knowledge, without experi- 
ence of the past, without true education: as a government which has 
neither pride of ancestry, nor hope of posterity: as a government 
where the ordinary statesman can only take short views, for no views 
which are long, which are based on long experience, will commend 
themselves to the man in the street. The ordinary statesman must 
adapt himself to democracy in such an age, for democracy is an in- 
evitable result of popular and universal education. 
But if fate should produce at intervals a great demagogue— 
in the best sense of that term—a popular leader or demagogue who 
can yet by his force of eloquence and force of character impose himself 
upon the street and the State, upon popular opinion, a Pericles in 
fact, is it not better, is it not common sense, to exalt that demagogue 
and his government and to canonise his rule—however short its dura- 
tion—and human life being short his rule will be short—as a happy 
incident, a blessed respite for a moment from the anarchy and see- 
saw which must otherwise mark the tragic career of democracy ? 
There are only two faiths possible, I think, to an historian: 
such a faith in Fate which I have endeavoured to interpret as the faith 
