Page:History of Freedom.djvu/117
MAY'S DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE 73
masters of a hundred legions. But their vie\vs of liberty were based on expediency, not on justice. They legislated for the favoured citizens of Greece, and were conscious of no principle that extended the same rights to the stranger and the slave. That discovery, without \vhich all political science \vas merely conventional, belongs to the follo\vers of Zeno. The dimness and poverty of their theological specula- tion caused the Stoics to attribute the government of the universe less to the uncertain design of gods than to a definite law of nature. By that la\v, which is superior to religious traditions and national authorities, and \vhich every l1lan can learn from a guardian angel \vho neither sleeps nor errs, all are governed alike, all are equal, all are bound in charity to each other, as members of one community and children of the same God. The unity of mankind implied the existence of rights and duties common to all men, which legislation neither gives nor takes a\vay. The Stoics held in no esteem the institutions that vary with time and place, and their ideal society resembled a universal Church more than an actual State. In every collision behveen authority and conscience they preferred the inner to the outer guide; and, in the words of Epictetus, regarded the la\vs of the gods, not the wretched la\vs of the dead. Their doctrine of equality, of fraternity, of humanity; their defence of individualism against public authority; their repudiation of slavery, redeemed democracy from the narrowness, the want of principle and of sympathy, which are its reproach among the Greeks. In practical life they preferred a mixed constitution to a purely popular government. Chrysippus thought it impossible to please both gods and men; and Seneca declared that the people is corrupt and incapable, and that nothing \vas wanting, under Nero, to the fulness of liberty, except the possibility of destroying it. But their lofty conception of freedom, as no exceptional privilege but the birthright of mankind, survived in the la\v of nations and purified the equity of Rome. \Vhilst Dorian oligarchs and l\'lacedonian kings crushed
