THREE:"True? True, sir? You go and look for yourself! And let me tell you one thingthere are no francs-tireurs here! We know quite well what we may do and what not, and only a moment ago I received a message from the Minister of the Interior, saying that non-combatants who shoot at the enemy expose themselves to danger and their fellow-citizens to retaliations."It took only seconds for the race to conclude.
THREE:"But she never got those jewels out of the house. She was found out by a piece of good luck--whether good or bad luck I shall leave you to guess. She had barely time to throw the gems down the well which is in the little courtyard behind the house, and my wife saw it all. The woman was informed that on my return from a journey I should be told everything. She knew that investigation would follow. And what did that fiend of a woman do. She forged a letter from me in which I made the most violent love to her and asked her to fly with me. Mind you, that letter was posted and delivered here. It was very easy to contrive that it should find its way into the hands of my poor wife; it was safe to reckon upon her emotional temperament. She read the letter; she took from a drawer a phial of some sleeping draught, and she poisoned herself." In one of the provinces of Germany there died, about ten years ago, a certain count, who had been rich and powerful, and, what is astonishing for one of that class, he was, according to the judgment of man, pure in faith and innocent in his life. Some time after his death, a holy man descended in spirit to hell, and beheld the count standing on the topmost rung of a ladder. He tells us that this ladder stood unconsumed amid the crackling flames around; and that it had been placed there to receive the family of the aforesaid count. There was, moreover, the black and frightful abyss out of which rose the fatal ladder. It was so ordered that the last comer took his stand at the top of the ladder, and when the rest of the family arrived he went down one step, and all below him did likewise.
THREE:The concessions to common sense and to contemporary schools of thought, already pointed out in those Dialogues which we suppose to have been written after the Republic, are still more conspicuous in the Laws. We do not mean merely the project of a political constitution avowedly offered as the best possible in existing circumstances, though not the best absolutely; but we mean that there is throughout a desire to present philosophy from its most intelligible, practical, and popular side. The extremely rigorous standard of sexual morality (p. 838) seems, indeed, more akin to modern than to ancient notions, but it was in all probability borrowed from the naturalistic school of ethics, the forerunner of Stoicism; for not only is there a direct appeal to Natures teaching in that connexion; but throughout the entire work the terms nature and naturally occur with greater frequency, we believe, than in all the rest of Platos writings put together. When, on the other hand, it is asserted that men can be governed by no other motive than pleasure (p. 663, B), we seem to see in this declaration a concession to the Cyrenaic school, as well as a return to the forsaken standpoint of the Protagoras. The increasing influence of Pythagoreanism is shown by271 the exaggerated importance attributed to exact numerical determinations. The theory of ideas is, as Prof. Jowett observes, entirely absent, its place being taken by the distinction between mind and matter.159
