Page:Munera pulveris.djvu/163

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IV.—COMMERCE.
125

and this a complete liberty: not being merely safe from the Siren, but also unbound from the mast, and not having to resist the passion, but making it fawn upon, and follow him—(this may be again partly the meaning of the fawning beasts about the Circean cave; so, again, George Herbert—

Correct thy passion's spite,
Then may the beasts draw thee to happy light) —

And it is only in such generosity that any man becomes capable of so governing others as to take true part in any system of national economy. Nor is there any other eternal distinction between the upper and lower classes than this form of liberty, Eleutheria, or benignity, in the one, and its opposite of slavery, Douleia, or malignity, in the other; the separation of these two orders of men, and the firm government of the lower by the higher, being the first conditions of possible wealth and economy in any State,—the Gods giving it no greater gift than the power to discern its true freemen, and "malignum spernere vulgus."

104. While I have traced the finer and