Monarchy again; and things go well for a time.  But, bless you, you have not found the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to do with forms of government.  So you go in search once more for a political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing thing, the detritus,—­your karma;—­and away you go squirreling round the changes again; and all this you call political evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in his cage;—­whereas if you found Tao,—­if you lived balancedly,—­ if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,—­ there would be no political evolution at all—­no squirreling,—­ but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life.  All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little more Tao with them than with us:  more consuming the detritus as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping the channels open.—­At least, I imagine so.

Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus’ day, the detritus had grown and grown.  Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and had accomplished something.  He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state:  wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as Dominus, and so forth:—­all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao:  the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it.  Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch, from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his own wife and daughter;—­the total failure of his life and labors thus miserably brought home to him before he died.