The curtain has not yet fallen, and will never fall, upon the last act. We live in a world which is always in process. Nature's genesis is unceasing. " Without haste, witfhout rest," her creative and re-creative processes are always operating. When one undertakes to talk about government he is drawn instinctively to some historic models. As thinking persons realized in every age the insufficiency of contemporaneous governments, there has scarcely been a time when the academic reformer was

THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL, 1 39

wanting. Certain ages may have lacked poets -- ours is said to be unpoetic and prosaic, and to await its poet-prophet -- ^but the academic idealist who could say, Go to, let us build a government, has been generally at hand. The dreams of the illuminated ones who have sought, by rule and theory, to make the crooked straight, to convert mankind into angels by legal enactment, are among the most pleasing, if abortive, works of genius. Some of the noblest spirits of the race have made this illusory effort. Plato, that splendid genius, in whose brain was wrapped the subtle essence which gave to Hellenic art and literature their incomparaible dharm, found a congenial theme in painting his ideal Republic. It was a beautiful attempt to develop a state based upon Socratic thought. He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out.