the incorruptible partner of feeling, self-control, and beneficence. [Sidenote: C] Hence are kings called ‘merciful’, for mercy best becomes those who are least afraid. A ruler’s fear should be of doing harm rather than of suffering it; for the former action is the cause of the latter, and this kind of fear on the part of a ruler is creditable to humanity. There is nothing ignoble in a fear for his subjects and of possible injury to them. Such rulers are like
_Dogs that keep ward o’er the sheep in the farmstead, anxiously watching At sound of a fierce wild beast_—
their anxiety being not for themselves, but for their charges.
Once when the Thebans had recklessly abandoned themselves [Sidenote: D] to feasting and carousal, Epaminondas went the round of the walls and the military posts all by himself, remarking that he was keeping sober and wakeful so that the rest might be drunk and asleep. When Cato, after the defeat at Utica, gave orders that every one else should be sent to sea, saw them on board, prayed that they might have a prosperous voyage, and then went back home and stabbed himself, it was a lesson on the text, ‘For whose sake should a ruler feel fear, and for what should he feel contempt?’ On the other hand, Clearchus, despot of Pontus, used at bedtime to crawl like a snake into a chest. [Sidenote: E] Similarly, Aristodemus of Argos crept into an upper room entered by a trap-door. Over this he would put the couch upon which he passed the night with his mistress. Meanwhile her mother dragged away the ladder from below, bringing it back and putting it in place in the morning. How, think you, must he have shuddered at the theatre, at the Government offices, at the Senate-House, at the banquet, when he turned his own bedchamber into a prison? Yes, kings are afraid _for_ their subjects, despots are afraid _of_ them. It follows that, as they add to their power, they add to their alarms; the more people they rule, the more people they fear.
[Sidenote: F] It is an improbable and unworthy view to hold of God—as some philosophers do—that He exists as an element in matter to which all sorts of things may happen, and in entities which are subject to innumerable accidents, chances and changes. In reality He is stablished somewhere aloft ‘_on holy pedestal_’ (as Plato puts it) in the realm of nature uniform and constant, and there ‘_moves according to Nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end_‘. And as in heaven the sun, His beauteous counterfeit, shows itself as His reflection in a mirror to those who have the power to see Him through it, so, in the justice and reason which shine in a state, He sets up a likeness of that which is in Himself, and, by copying that likeness, men [Sidenote: 782] whom philosophy has gifted and chastened model themselves after the highest pattern.