a politically-minded man. Politics is the art and science of governing masses. The art and science which appealed to his ambition is that which enables the individual to govern himself. So far as he was concerned, he felt little need of external government. Indeed, like many of the saints and sages, conscious that he himself was actuated by the purest internal motives, he looked with wary and somewhat jealous eye upon the existence of an external controlling power in the state which might be actuated by motives far less pure and in the exercise of its constituted activity, warp him from the bias of his soul. In this respect, he was distinctly a child of the time-spirit which followed the Revolution and preceded the Civil War, that period when the first dire need of a powerful union had passed and the second dire need of it had not yet been fully manifested. He could sympathize with his friend Thoreau, who withdrew from the social organization to the extent of refusing to pay his taxes. But his Yankee common sense preserved him from imitating this fanaticism. He perceived, as every intelligent lover of freedom does, that a decent conformity is the very secret of freedom.
He loved freedom too much to coquet with anarchy. The imaginative masters of his political speculations, Plato, More, Milton, Burke, Montesquieu, had confirmed him, furthermore, in the conviction that "politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity." The foundation
