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can be intrusted to his honor. Therefore his ambition may be crushed with insulting rebuff in the very instant of its fancied triumph. He is likely to suffer this result, not merely from his untrustworthiness, but also from the scorn he awakens even in those he serves. A generous heart must loathe a traitor, even if aided by his treachery. If it stoops to accept the help, it will yet shrink from the tool. When Darius was fleeing from his conqueror, his own general, the infamous Bessus, turned on him, and slew him in his misfortune, and then went to Alexander and claimed a reward. The noble victor, enraged at such baseness, ordered him to be put to death with tortures. When Camillus besieged Falerii, the principal teacher of the Falerian youth led them all out and delivered them up to the Roman general. But Camillus, instead of rewarding the traitorous schoolmaster, stripped off his clothes, tied his hands behind his back, gave every boy a scourge, and told them to whip him back into the city; which they did, undoubtedly with a relish. All persons take a sort of satisfaction in scorning and avoiding, or girding at and lashing, the traitor. No one hesitates to cast him off without remorse; as, when the Greeks walled up the temple into which the perfidious Pausanias had fled for refuge, his own mother laid the first stone. He must, therefore, often be deprived of his promised reward. But should his plan succeed, and should he grasp the meed he schemed for so foully, and hold it safely, even then it is but a barren sceptre that is placed in his gripe. Every throb of his better nature shoots self-disgust through him, and makes him loathe the prize he bought at so fatal a price. And when, unable either to escape or to bear his own shame, he seeks to comfort the pangs of conscience and honor by the respect and love of his neighbors, but reads abhorrence in the glance of every eye, and repulsion in the gesture of every hand, what remains for him except to do as his great prototype and ancestor at Jerusalem did?

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In this connection we must not overlook another lesson of the widest applicability, the distinction between real and nominal traitors. There is an apparent treachery which is genuine loyalty, when a man forsakes old positions and pledges, at a severe cost, in obedience to new and higher perceptions of

truth and duty. And there is a thorough perfidy which sometimes passes for resolute fidelity, where a man, yielding to pride of consistency or to the appeals of self-interest, occupies a post or maintains professions opposed to what he knows to be the highest morality. Many good and true men in all ages have been falsely called traitors, because judged by vulgar standards far below the authority of their consciences; or because they failed in the unequal struggle, cowards, tyrants, and the obsequious crowd of incompetents triumphing over them and stigmatizing them with the opprobrious title. It is an old artifice, manifested as widely as the history of controversy, for vicious characters of all kinds to try to escape the names that sting them deepest and gall them worst, because felt to fit them so well, by persistently casting them on their innocent superiors, opposers, and victims; and often it happens, through the indiscrimination of contemporaries and the carelessness of posterity, that the epithets thus unjustly interchanged get permanently fixed to the wrong persons. If a catholic spirit of love be the truth of truths, and a sincere devotedness to the will of Heaven and to the good of man be the essence of loyalty and the crown of virtue, if a cruel spirit of self-will be the evil of evils, and the maintenance of personal or class prerogatives, at the expense of every higher authority and the welfare of other people, be the substance of treason and the epitome of all wrong, then Servetus was orthodox at the stake, and Calvin heretic on the tribunal; Pope Innocent was a traitor when he pronounced iniquitous sentence in the Primate's chair, and Savonarola a martyred patriot when his hot ashes sanctified the Square of Florence; poor John Huss, expiring among the Bohemian hills, was a faithful saint of God, and the merciless Emperor, priests, and nobles who mocked his agony, perfidious fiends. The truth, unqualifiedly applied, would reverse many a sentence and epithet current in the world as just. Especially, neutralizing the blinding influence of outward defeat and outward triumph on the fickle sympathies of passion, it would rectify the decisions of ignorance, prejudice, and spite. It would burn up and blow away the media of silver gauze and golden mist through which a great success causes its achiever and his concerns to be seen.

Tearing sceptre and robe from the selfish adventurer who has stolen, through flattery, deception, perjury, and slaughter, to an imperial diadem, it would pluck off his brilliant mask, triply woven of talent, energy, and usefulness, drag him to the bar of trial, and show him in the full deformity of his crime. For unquestionably a host of deep-dyed traitors have escaped the name simply because they were successful in their treachery, muffled the mouths of discerning censors with bribes or with penalties, and afterwards by their wise policy caused their wickedness to be overlooked, and gradually forgotten. So proud is the world of a striking executive genius, so fond of relentless tenacity of purpose, so subservient in presence of an impressive victory, that where these are found combined it easily pardons, and soon forgets, the gravest defects and offences, especially when the faults are subsequently disguised in benefits to itself.

One more lesson must be noted before we leave the subject. Traitors show themselves and play their part in many different spheres of life. Their principal historic representatives are martial, have ranged themselves with the foreign enemies, or engaged in violent internal conspiracies against the government of their country. When the word treason or traitor is used, we instinctively think of war, of leaders or soldiers betraying fortresses, surrendering armies, communicating secret plans. But this comparative confinement of the term to the relations of warfare must not deceive us. The thing appears as really, and often more odiously, in times of peace, in the manifold civic, professional, and private relations of society. In war, the passions, particularly the various modifications of ambition, rivalry, and jealousy, are stirred into unprecedented activity. The exposures and exigencies incurred, the disgraces inflicted, and the honors bestowed, are multiplied and intensified as at no other period. Hence a threefold cause operates to make visible traitors more numerous, conspicuous, and memorable in the relations of war than in those of peace; namely, the more aggravated excitement of the ground passions of our nature, the more kindling bribes held out to them, and the more eager attention paid in such a crisis by the highly wrought public mind to whatever then happens.

Guarding ourselves against these sophistical influences, we shall perceive that there are in the various walks of civil life enactors of treachery tenfold baser in themselves, and tenfold more corrupting in their examples, than any malecontent, deserter, or betrayer of the camp. There may be an alleviating consideration for the military traitor in the effervescence of hot-hearted provocations, or in some revulsion of despair. But the creature, compacted in equal parts of falsehood, fawning, and malignity, who in the even ways of peace, in the household confidences of society, is deliberately untrue to the trusts of business, of friendship, of office in state or church, his unprovoked treachery as cold as the poison of the bloodless spider, is a renegade so unrelieved by tint of light or shade of excuse as to mock comparison. Surely he who consciously admits into his breast lying thoughts, malicious desires, and felonious purposes, hoisting the flag of the Devil over that stronghold of the mind where he was placed in charge to keep God's banner floating unsullied, is a more arrant traitor than he who lets the emissaries or legions of the foe into any material citadel.

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1. History of Greece under Foreign Domination. By GEORGE FINLAY, LL. D. In Five Volumes. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. 1857.

2. History of the Greek Revolution. By GEORGE FINLAY, LL. D. In Two Volumes. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. 1861.

IN all the long annals of our race, so little encouraging sometimes, and often so unintelligible, there will hardly be found a more remarkable subject for contemplation than the history of Greece under foreign domination. One hundred and forty-six years before Christ, the Achæan League defeated and Corinth sacked by the Roman Consul Mummius, Greece became a Roman province. Nineteen hundred and eighty

nine years afterwards, the people of Athens assembled before the white palace of their Bavarian king, and demanded a constitution, by which, at last, liberty was restored to the Greeks. In that vast interval the face of the world had changed. New religions had arisen in the East, and through the North and West a new civilization had spread. In the city of the Cæsars was installed another language and a different empire. Yet, amidst these ceaseless changes, while empires rose and fell,— while religions and races decayed and passed away, - the Parthenon still towered serene and beautiful above the Acropolis, centre, as it were, and symbol of the undying unity of the Greeks.

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This strange story of so many ages of tumult and persecution, of corruption and devastation, of exile and despair, yet of vitality so inextinguishable, of faith and heroism so persistent and marvellous, has at length been fitly told by Mr. Finlay. Among the great historical works in which this age has been so fruitful, we do not, on the whole, know a greater. For others may be claimed a more flowing style, or a more dramatic subject; but as an historical thinker, Mr. Finlay is not surpassed. He does not paint scenes; he seeks for causes. He has to do, not with individuals, but with a race, not with one civilization, or one religion, but with several. There is nothing of the rhetorician in him; he does not aim to entertain, but to instruct. To the conciseness of Tacitus he adds the political observation of Polybius. If he is often severe, it is because he loves the truth; and if we may not always agree with his conclusions, we appreciate always their honesty, as the mature convictions of many years of study and of thought. In all respects an original writer, his merits and defects are his own. From the first page to the last, through seven solid volumes, you recognize always an earnest, decided mind, a transparent truthfulness, even a certain austerity of virtue.

It was in 1823 that Mr. Finlay first went to Greece, to take part in the effort which the Greeks had already begun to make to throw off the Turkish yoke. From that time, Greece has been his home: he has grown up with it; its language is his language, its hopes are his hopes. When the task of deliver

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