Note 6 — REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh. Even their most speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered attainable by Hellas, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from the Laws, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to the common life of Athens and of Hellas. So in the England of the seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical in their aims. Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord and its ills. This was in 1628—fatal date!