strange race, our acts have, in a larger measure than elsewhere, an experimental character. The establishment of a system of secular public instruction in the Philippine Islands, where previously all instruction had been directed by ecclesiastical authority, was a very conspicuous experiment. Many factors in the problem could not be determined beforehand. It could not be known in advance whether it would be possible or not to secure an adequate number of teachers of the quality required to carry the undertaking to a successful issue. It was recognized that we had to do with persons whose only conception of a school was that it was a subordinate adjunct to the church, and it was uncertain what would be their attitude towards the new system. It could not, moreover, be known in advance to what extent the authority of the church would be effective in preventing children from attending secular schools.

In view of the ambitions and hereditary purposes of the church, there was no reasonable ground to expect that it would coöperate unconditionally with the government in the work of secularizing instruction. For centuries the church had been the dominant factor in the affairs of the islands. It had aimed, with a lofty purpose, to educate and convert the inhabitants, and to bring them into loyal and devoted submission to its authority. Its long service in the campaign against barbarism had made it profoundly conscious of its great mission, and it was morally impossible for it suddenly to transfer its sympathies and support from ecclesiastical to secular instruction. If one is so thoroughly and uncompromisingly a radical as to be irritated by the opposition to secular education which the church has sometimes expressed, he is hardly in a position to deal rationally with any social question. He fails to appreciate the compelling force of a great tradition. He apparently expects progress to be achieved by a series of social miracles. This is not the method by which society is moved from one stage to another. In general, old traditions and old opinions are only gradually worn away and supplanted by new opinions and new ambitions. The church, the oldest, the stablest, the most consistent of European institutions, has a history which no generation can ignore, and it would not be true to its past and its traditional opinions if it did not proclaim its belief in the superiority of the instruction which it provides to any that may be offered by secular authority. But an opinion, even an old opinion, does not establish a fact. The church in the Philippine Islands has accomplished a great undertaking in turning the people from barbarism towards civilization, and it has still before it a task sufficiently important to engage all its force without departing from its legitimate field. Between this field and the proper realm of state action, the founders of the government of the

United States have fixed a line of demarkation in separating the state from the church.

The education of the less advanced races under influences proceeding from western nations is important, in that it enlarges the area of popular progress, and contributes to the preservation of the higher forms of cultivation. It is almost inevitable that we should believe in the permanence of our institutions. Each age regards itself exempt from the forces that have ruined the cultivation of preceding ages. Yet in spite of this belief, whenever a society has fallen, it has succumbed to forces that ruined its predecessors; it has succumbed to barbarism, either the barbarism of the invading stranger, or barbarism generated within by governmental oppression or neglect. Against invading barbarians, civilized nations are basing their security now on their superior command of the forces of destruction. But the threatening barbarian may be already within the limits of the field claimed for civilization, or a barbarian invasion may be peaceful, continuing through many decades, and leaving, in the end, the society invaded composed of new elements and animated by strange purposes. Against an uprising of internal barbarism or an invasion like this a powerful military organization furnishes no defence.

The question of the power of barbarism to overwhelm civilization is more than a question of idle speculation. The recent legislation of several nations of Aryan stock against the invasion of the Chinese, the loud demand, from other nations, for restriction of immigration and the rising tide of internal barbarism in certain countries indicate that the question is eminently practical. The consideration that has moved legislators to provide for the exclusion of unwelcome elements is not the fear that there will be more laborers than will be needed to perform the work required in the countries in question, but that the unrestrained coming of members of alien races will break down the existing standards of living and substitute barbarism for civilization.

The force of the desire to migrate is destined to increase with the increasing contact of nations, and with the development of the facilities for movement. Awaken the lower races from their passive condition, infect them with the fever of progress, and they will find their territory too narrow for their expanded desires. Japan, scarcely half a century out of her stagnant mediævalism, feels already the impulse to move, and to seek a broader field for her stimulated national spirit. Sooner or later the other nations of the Orient will be aroused to progressive activity. The voice of western steamships in their harbors, the roar of railway trains across their fields, and the rattle of western industry in their cities

will render the continuance of their long sleep impossible, and they will learn that facilities for traveling have made the territory of every nation contiguous to that of every other nation.

Against this movement neither military equipment nor immigration laws will in the long run be of any avail. In view of this state of things, civilization, as represented by the Anglo-Saxon nations, is pursuing a policy of aggressive defence. Under the tutelage of these nations, whether expressed through schools or the institutions of industry, the barbarian is led to lay aside his barbarism and become an ally of civilized society. The rule of these nations is an educational process. On whatever point the instruction bears, whether on any of the numberless arts of peace or even on the art of war, the result is essentially the same: the persons affected are brought nearer the standard of civilization. The process of education directed to any end recognized in an enlightened state imposes a sense of social obligation and responsibility which transforms the barbarian and puts him on the side of civilization. In a great nation culture has a certain momentum that is wanting where a people is broken up into a large number of petty independent states. When, therefore, the inhabitants of a small state or an isolated region are drawn into close union with a great nation, they are bound to be affected by the currents of that nation's life, and to be carried on towards a higher phase of civilization by the momentum of its culture. By this process of education the nations of Europe and America now dominant in the world are relieving the helplessness of the stagnant races, and preparing for the perpetuity of civilization by the abolition of barbarism.

“A

ROBERT YELVERTON TYRRELL

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

ND would they take the poor boy's life for the like o' that?" "Bedad they would, if he had as many lives as Plutarch." This little dialogue was overheard not long ago in an Irish county. It may, perhaps, fitly introduce the present paper, as showing what a world-wide fame has been won by "Plutarch's Lives." It will be observed that the phrase "Plutarch's Lives," coming down to the peasantry from a distant and obscure tradition of the Hedge Schoolmaster, had lost its meaning for them, and Plutarch had become not the author but the possessor of many lives. Mr. Strachan Davidson in his "Cicero" couples the "Lives" with the philosophical works of Cicero, as having exercised the greatest and most constant influence on subsequent literature; and when we remember Shakespeare's large indebtedness to North's “Plutarch," we must admit that Mr. Strachan Davidson has not accorded to the "Lives" an unduly high place among epoch-making works.

But though Plutarch has exercised so great an influence on literature, we know very little about his life, and that little chiefly gleaned from his own writings. The chief of biographers has had no biographer. The legends which have gathered round him, such as the tradition that he was made consul by Trajan, have no historical basis. He was born a Boeotian, in that crass atmosphere of which Juvenal speaks as the very home and centre of dulness, though it produced Pindar, perhaps the most truly "inspired" of all poets ancient or modern. His native place was Charonea, the town which commanded the Boeotian plain, and which so often provided a field for contending hosts to meet and put the destinies of Hellas to "battle's brute arbitrament." As Belgium in modern history has earned the name of "the cockpit" of Europe, so Cheronea (as Plutarch tells us) was called more pleasantly by Epaminondas "Mars' ballroom," so often did it invite the states of Greece to the carnival of war. His birth may be placed about 50 A. D. He studied at Athens, visited Alexandria, and must have spent some time in Asia Minor. Rome, "beautiful Rome," as he calls it, was visited by him at least twice, probably oftener. He delivered lectures there in the Greek tongue, and many of his treatises, as they have come down to us, seem to have been little more than expanded notes of these lectures. He could not have lectured in Latin, a language of which he had very little

Copyright, 1904, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

knowledge, only enabling him to take in the general meaning of a sentence which he could not have construed word by word. His knowledge of Latin literature is very small, extending only to histories and memoirs essential for his "Lives." To Virgil he never refers, nor to Ovid, whose “Fasti” would have been so useful to him for his "Roman Questions.” His only reference to Latin poetry is one to Horace. It is in his life of Lucullus, where he tells the story to which Horace refers in his "Epistles." According to Horace, Lucullus, being asked if he could supply a hundred purple cloaks for a certain scenic representation, said that he thought he had some, and would see. After a while he sent back a message that he found he had some five thousand, of which the "entrepreneur" might have as many as he wanted. Horace adds the reflection, "it is a poor establishment in which there is not much gear of which the owner knows nothing and in which the thief finds his account." Plutarch seems to have read the passage. The way in which he tells the anecdote is this: "When the 'entrepreneur' said he wanted a hundred, Lucullus told him to take twice as many; on which the poet Flaccus made the comment that a man is not really rich unless he has more property that is overlooked and unsuspected than that which is seen and recognized." The comment, however, is more like that of a man who had been told that Horace had used the incident to point a moral than of one who had read the actual words of the poet. However, the passage is interesting as showing that the great Gibbon nodded when he said that between Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Libanius,-between the century before Christ and the fourth century after,—there is not in the whole of Greek literature a single allusion to Horace or Virgil. Plutarch was equally ignorant of the prose literature of Rome, including the philosophical works of Cicero which, as we have seen, according to Mr. Strachan Davidson, contest with the "Lives" the dominion of the intellect of posterity. The two passages in Plutarch's life of Cicero which seem to show some knowledge of Cicero's philosophical works, are more likely to have come from Tiro's "Life of Cicero." When asked which of the speeches of Demosthenes he admired the most, Cicero replied, the longest. Again, Plutarch quotes the remark of Cicero when Cæsar ordered the restoration of the statues of Pompey which had been thrown down, "he is erecting the statues of Pompey, but he is planting his own.” It is an interesting observation of the late Dr. Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, in his admirable lectures on Plutarch,3