profaned the philosophy which maintained the rights of all by a selfish indulgence of the rights of a few. Thus it is: the laws of nature are invariable, and man sets them aside that he may have the pleasure of travelling through a labyrinth in search of them again.
Pleasure, in an open and innocent garb, by some strange process of reasoning, is called vice; yet man (so closely is he linked to the chains of necessity—so irresistibly is he impelled to fulfil the end of his being,) must seek her at whatever price: he becomes a hypocrite, and braves damnation with all its pains.
Grecian literature,—the finest the world has ever produced,—was at length restored: its form and mode we obtained from the manuscripts which the ravages of time, of the Goths, and of the still more savage Turks, had spared. The burning of the library at Alexandria was an evil of importance. This library is said to have contained volumes of the choicest Greek authors.
A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT BY JURIES.
A FRAGMENT.[1]
Government, as it now subsists, is perhaps an
engine at once the most expensive and inartificial
that could have been devised as a remedy for
the imperfections of society. Immense masses of the
product of labour are committed to the discretion of
certain individuals for the purpose of executing its
intentions, or interpreting its meaning. These have
not been consumed, but wasted, in the principal part of
the past history of political society.
Government may be distributed into two parts:—First, the fundamental—that is, the permanent forms, which regulate the deliberation or the action of the whole; from which it results that a state is democrat-*
- ↑ From The Shelley Papers, 1833.
