But near the end of his life, when he composed his
Politics, he was brought, grudgingly, to make a memorable concession. To preserve the sovereignty of law,
which is the reason and the custom of generations, and to
restrict the realm of choice and change, he conceived it
best that no class of society should preponderate, that
one man should not be subject to another, that all should
command and all obey. He advised that power should
be distributed to high and low; to the first according to
their property, to the others according to numbers; and
that it should centre in the middle class. If aristocracy
and democracy were fairly combined and balanced against
each other, he thought that none would be interested to
disturb the serene majesty of impersonal government.
To reconcile the two principles, he would admit even the
poorer citizens to office and pay them for the discharge of
public duties; but he would compel the rich to take their
share, and would appoint magistrates by election and not
by lot. In his indignation at the extravagance of Plato,
and his sense of the significance of facts, he became,
against his will, the prophetic exponent of a limited and
regenerated democracy. But the Politics, which, to the
world of living men, is the most valuable of his works,
acquired no influence on antiquity, and is never quoted
before the time of Cicero. Again it disappeared for
many centuries; it \vas unkno\vn to the Arabian com-
mentators, and in Western Europe it was first brought
to light by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the very time when
an infusion of popular elements was modifying feudalism,
and it helped to emancipate political philosophy from
despotic theories and to confirm it in the ways of freedom.
The three generations of the Socratic school did more for the future reign of the people than all the institutions of the States of Greece. They vindicated conscience against authority, and subjected both to a higher law; and they proclaimed that doctrine of a mixed constitution, which has prevailed at last over absolute monarchy, and still has to contend against extreme Republicans and Socialists, and against the
