Clouds and in the Birds he ridicules the glorious dreams of Plato, the idealistic faith of the first Utopian. In Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusa he pours inextinguishable laughter on women's ways and on their claim to intellectual power. in the Knights he satirizes the chosen leader of the Athenian democracy and shows his skepticism of democracy or any government which relies on the political intelligence of the average man. But the reasons for this attitude are in a measure different in the two periods. Aristophanes is not a Rousseau dreaming of a golden age in the early days of human history. Such a vision would have seemed to him as foolish as Plato's ideal republic. The hard clear light of intellectual realism which sets the oddities and abnormalities of men sharply before us in comedy is not conclusive to idyllic dreams, or to any toleration of them. What Aristophanes sees as good is the state of society which was upset and changed by the politicians who brought on the war, the age which is just becoming the last. He is fighting a brilliant rearguard action for the world of yesterday, which still has hopes of being the world of the day after tomorrow. His is not the distant and random gun sullenly fired by the thoroughly defeated in some mood of childish petulance. These screaming shells which light up incandescently the battle field of Greek, and particularly of Athenian life come from

the entrenched camp of the conservatives, of the men who are satisfied with things as they have been. They dream no dreams, see no visions of the night. They have seen Utopias attempted, but have seen none realized, nor do they expect to. If they were to put their belief in words they would probably say that man is as near perfection as the finite imperfection of his nature permits; that any change is likely to be for the worse. It is the comfortable faith of the jeunesse dorée and of the highly placed for whom any change is likely to be a loss. The world has always had men who believe this; no doubt it always will, but they have rarely had so charming, so adroit, a defender of their faith as Aristophanes.

We have many of the same faith today; in fact they rule the world of politics, as they always did at Sparta and often at Athens. But the conservative of these latter days is not content merely to repel attacks upon the citidel of "things as they are," or even to carry the war into the enemy's country in Aristophanic fashion, that is to attack utopianism with ridicule and burlesque. He has now a scientific background and something of a philosophic faith. When the theory of evolution assumed the form fixed by Darwin and often given his name, one of the first things done by the world was to emphasize the idea of change, presumably to something better, to justify its Utopian

ideals by saying that the new word justified the utmost reach of faith in the perfectibility of man. Science had come to the aid of idealism. All was well with the world, not because it was a perfect world, not because immense changes were not necessary, but because those changes were inevitable in a world now seen to be one of endless change, and would, soon it was apparently supposed, lead to the fulfillment of the dreamer's hopes. But as the years have passed it has become the fashion to stress a different phase of evolution. Some of its advocates have even suggested, logically enough, that the changes implied by evolution may not prove to be of the kind that we expect, may not be, from our present point of view, advances at all. They have also pointed out that whether we like those changes or dislike them we are quite powerless to prevent or to accelerate them. This fact in itself is a helpful idea to the conservative for if we are powerless to affect in any way the course of life, surely the wise thing to do is not to attempt reforms but to await in patience the inevitable order of events. And of patience the conservative has his full share.

But the element in evolution which proves the greatest help to the conservative philosopher is the fact, increasingly stressed as the years go by, that evolution is a matter of endless ages. Each year seems to lengthen vastly the period of time which, as the scientist

thinks, must have been required to bring the earth to its present not very advanced state. He talks glibly of millions of years, of spaces of time before which the mind is wholly helpless. And then he says, or at least implies, that future changes cannot reasonably be expected to take less time. To the radical, bent upon seeing a more perfect world in his own day, such ideas are anathema. If fully accepted they put the brand of folly upon all his works, upon all his plans. Clearly the thing for him to do is to enjoy the world as it is as fully as possible and to forget his foolish dreams. But to his conservative opponent these ideas are as honey sweet to the mouth. He is told that the only wise thing to do is the one thing he has always yearned to do, to abide in peace the outcome of the slow-moving years. They point out to him the folly of his world-old opponent. Should he not be content?

But this scientific support the conservative of the days of Aristophanes had not so claerly at call as has his brother of today. For this reason, though the spirit of that conservatism was the same then as now, the reasons given for it were only in part the same.

To the Greek, education meant primarily training in music and in bodily strength and skill, though the term “music” held, no doubt, a wider meaning than is given it today since it included poetry, and at times,

other arts. This type of education, when taught as it should be, was held to develop the moral virtues, and strength and energy of character. In Athens, at least, great emphasis was placed upon education. The greatest names of Greek history are those of educators; the great masterpieces of Greek life, the things by which it is remembered, are the outcome of the long training which we call education. To be ten, twenty years under a great teacher, to train oneself through half a life time to be an orator, a painter, an actor, or a sculptor, this was common among Athenians of the higher class. They thought much as to what education was, what methods should be used, what results should be gained. We are not surprised, when we hear in the Clouds a bitter debate between the partisans of the old and of the new methods of education. Right Logic, and the name indicates the attitude of the author, is attacking the new-fangled methods of education.

"To hear then prepare of the Discipline rare which flourished in Athens of yore

When Honor and truth were in fashion with youth and Sobriety bloomed on our shore;

First of all the old rule was preserved in our

school "that boys should be seen and not heard:"

And then to the home of the Harpist would come decorous in action and word