Plato, to seek the nearest shelter, to veil his head, and to wait
patiently till the storm of violence and wrong should pass away.

It is hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the appalling
contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a
social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of
reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally
unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by
reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass
indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural
leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism
spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even
discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The
idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their
fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual
patrimony. Just as a government deteriorates when it is no longer tested
by continual reference to principles of justice, so a Utopia, however
magnificent, fades from the mind of the believer when he ceases to
revise it by comparison with facts, when it is no longer a reply to the
problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and theory being once
divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and the plain
man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life as he finds
it.

This analysis helps us to understand why the Western Empire, on the eve
of dissolution, had already assumed the appearance of a semi-barbarian
state. In those districts which had been lately settled with Teutonic
colonists the phenomenon may be explained as resulting from
over-sanguine attempts to civilise an intractable stock. But even in the
heart of the oldest provinces the conditions were little better. Law and