important era in the philosophy of history. Its special
applicability to the politics of our own day has been illustrated
in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French state had lost
those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocracy and
moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only
barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences
against the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced].

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining,
and which has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that
general law common to all organic bodies which we call the
Instability of the Homogeneous. The various manifestations of this
law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of
the different forms of government, (8) are expounded with great
clearness by Polybius, who claimed for his theory, in the
Thucydidean spirit, that it is a [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], not a mere [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
and that a knowledge of it will enable the impartial observer (9)
to discover at any time what period of its constitutional evolution
any particular state has already reached and into what form it will
be next differentiated, though possibly the exact time of the
changes may be more or less uncertain. (10)

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political
revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said
to show what is his true position in the rational development of
the 'Idea' which I have called the Philosophy of History, because
it is the unifying of history. Seen darkly as it is through the
glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more metaphysical than