518 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



the Koman empire, to subdue the feudal anarchy and bring 

 the whole people of any European nation into subjection 

 to government (though Christianity in the most concen- 

 trated form of its influence was co-operating in the work) 

 required thrice as many centuries as have elapsed since that 

 time. 



"Now if these philosophers had known human nature 

 under any other type than that of their own age, and of the 

 particular classes of society among whom they lived, it would 

 have occurred to them, that wherever this habitual submis- 

 sion to law and government has been firmly and durably 

 established, and yet the vigour and manliness of character 

 which resisted its establishment have been in any degree 

 preserved, certain requisites have existed, certain conditions 

 have been fulfilled, of which the following may be regarded as 

 the principal. 



"First: there has existed, for all who were accounted 

 citizens, for all who were not slaves, kept down by brute 

 force, a system of education, beginning with infancy and 

 continued through life, of which whatever else it might 

 include, one main and incessant ingredient was restraining 

 discipline. To train the human being in the habit, and 

 thence the power, of subordinating his personal impulses and 

 aims, to what were considered the ends of society ; of adher- 

 ing, against all temptation, to the course of conduct which 

 those ends prescribed ; of controlling in himself all feelings 

 which were liable to militate against those ends, and encou- 

 raging all such as tended towards them ; this was the purpose, 

 to which every outward motive that the authority directing 

 the system could command, and every inward power or prin- 

 ciple which its knowledge of human nature enabled it to evoke, 

 were endeavoured to be rendered instrumental. The entire 

 civil and military policy of the ancient commonwealths was 

 such a system of training; in modern nations its place has 

 been attempted to be supplied, principally, by religious 

 teaching. And whenever and in proportion as the strictness 

 of the restraining discipline was relaxed, the natural ten- 

 dency of mankind to anarchy re-asserted itself; the state 



