THE NEW TORYISM. 437 



the vision through the agency of which things previously grouped by 

 certain external resemblances or by certain extrinsic circumstances 

 come to be more truly grouped in conformity with their intrinsic 

 structures or natures. Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as indis- 

 criminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped physical vis- 

 ion. Instance the early arrangement of plants under the heads trees, 

 shrubs, and herbs : size, the most conspicuous trait, being the ground 

 of distinction, and the assemblages formed being such as united many 

 plants extremely unlike in their natures, and separated others that are 

 near akin. Or still better, take the popular classification which puts 

 together under the same general name fish and shell-fish, and under 

 the sub-name, shell-fish, puts together crustaceans and mollusks ; nay, 

 which goes further, and regards as fish the cetacean mammals. Partly 

 because of the likeness in their modes of life as inhabiting the water, 

 and partly because of some general resemblance in their tastes, creat- 

 ures that are in their essential natures far more widely separated than 

 a fish is from a bird, are grouped under the same class and under the 

 same sub-class. 



Now, the general truth thus exemplified holds throughout those 

 higher ranges of intellectual vision concerned with things not present- 

 able to the senses, and, among others, such things as political institu- 

 tions and political measures. For among these, too, we shall find that 

 the results of inadequate intellectual faculty, or inadequate culture of 

 it, or both, are erroneous classings and consequent erroneous conclu- 

 sions. Indeed, the liability to error is here much greater, since the 

 things with which the intellect is concerned do not admit of examina- 

 tion in the same easy way. You can not touch or see a political insti- 

 tution : it can be known only by an effort of constructive imagination. 

 Neither can you apprehend by physical perception a political measure : 

 this still more requires a process of mental representation by which its 

 elements are put together in thought, and the essential nature of the 

 combination conceived. Here, therefore, still more than in the cases 

 above named, defective intellectual vision is shown in grouping by 

 external characters or extrinsic circumstances. How institutions are 

 wrongly classed from this cause, we see in the common notion that 

 the Roman Republic was a popular form of government. Look into 

 the early ideas of the French revolutionists who aimed at an ideal state 

 of freedom, and you find that the institutions and doings of the Ro- 

 mans were their models ; and even now an historian might be named 

 who instances the corruptions of the Roman Republic as showing us 

 what popular government leads to. Yet the resemblance between the 

 institutions of the Romans and free institutions properly so called was 

 less than that between a shark and a porpoise — a resemblance of gen- 

 eral external form accompanying widely different internal structures. 

 For the Roman Government was that of a small oligarchy within a 

 larger oligarchy, the members of each being unchecked autocrats. A 



