[Footnote 1:  Iliad, ii., 204.]

How would it be possible that, everywhere and at all times, we should see many millions of people, nay, even hundreds of millions, become the willing and obedient subjects of one man, sometimes even one woman, and provisionally, even, of a child, unless there were a monarchical instinct in men which drove them to it as the form of government best suited to them?  This arrangement is not the product of reflection.  Everywhere one man is king, and for the most part his dignity is hereditary.  He is, as it were, the personification, the monogram, of the whole people, which attains an individuality in him.  In this sense he can rightly say:  l’etat c’est moi.  It is precisely for this reason that in Shakespeare’s historical plays the kings of England and France mutually address each other as France and England, and the Duke of Austria goes by the name of his country.  It is as though the kings regarded themselves as the incarnation of their nationalities.  It is all in accordance with human nature; and for this very reason the hereditary monarch cannot separate his own welfare and that of his family from the welfare of his country; as, on the other hand, mostly happens when the monarch is elected, as, for instance, in the States of the Church.[1] The Chinese can conceive of a monarchical government only; what a republic is they utterly fail to understand.  When a Dutch legation was in China in the year 1658, it was obliged to represent that the Prince of Orange was their king, as otherwise the Chinese would have been inclined to take Holland for a nest of pirates living without any lord or master.[2] Stobaeus, in a chapter in his Florilegium, at the head of which he wrote That monarchy is best, collected the best of the passages in which the ancients explained the advantages of that form of government.  In a word, republics are unnatural and artificial; they are the product of reflection.  Hence it is that they occur only as rare exceptions in the whole history of the world.  There were the small Greek republics, the Roman and the Carthaginian; but they were all rendered possible by the fact that five-sixths, perhaps even seven-eighths, of the population consisted of slaves.  In the year 1840, even in the United States, there were three million slaves to a population of sixteen millions.  Then, again, the duration of the republics of antiquity, compared with that of monarchies, was very short.  Republics are very easy to found, and very difficult to maintain, while with monarchies it is exactly the reverse.  If it is Utopian schemes that are wanted, I say this:  the only solution of the problem would be a despotism of the wise and the noble, of the true aristocracy and the genuine nobility, brought about by the method of generation—­that is, by the marriage of the noblest men with the cleverest and most intellectual women.  This is my Utopia, my Republic of Plato.