and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and curtail and reduce otherswhenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as honourable as another. He lives through the day, indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he is for total abstinence, and tries to get thin; then again, he is at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is at politics, and starts to his feet and says and does anything that may turn up; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither order nor law; and this is the way of him, this he terms joy and freedom and happiness. There is liberty, equality, and fraternity enough in him."

The life of chance desire, unregulated by any subordinating principle, then, is the third stage of the descent and degradation of the soul.

In the state democracy speedily and inevitably passes over into tyranny. All appetite is insatiable. In a state where each citizen does what he pleases "all things are just ready to burst with liberty; excess of liberty, whether in states or in

dividuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. Then tyranny naturally arises out of democracy." He then proceeds, with prophetic pen, to trace the evolution of the modern political boss. First there develops a class of drones who get their living as professional politicians. Second, "there is the richest class, which, in a nation of traders, is generally the most orderly; they are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones; this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them. There is also a third class, consisting of working-men who are not politicians and have little to live upon; these, when assembled, are the largest and most powerful class in a democracy; but then, the multitude is seldom willing to meet unless they get a little honey. Their leaders take the estates of the rich and give to the people as much of them as they can consistently with keeping the greater part themselves. The people have always some one as a champion whom they raise into greatness. This is the very root from which a tyrant (that is, as we should say, a boss) comes. When he first appears above ground, he is a protector. At first, in the early days of his power, he smiles upon every one and salutes every one; he, to be called a tyrant who is making promises in public and also in

private, and wanting to be kind and good to every one! Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery." The worst form of government, according to Plato, is that which we know too well to-day in our great cities: the government of the professional politician who maintains himself by buying the votes of the poor with the money he has squeezed out of the rich. All pretence of administering the government in the interest of the community is frankly abandoned. The boss, or tyrant, as Plato calls him, frankly and unblushingly avows that he is in politics for what he can get out of it.

The true statesman, the philosopher king, in Plato's phrase, sees and serves the public good. Such a government Plato calls an aristocracy, or the government of the best for the good of all. First below that comes timocracy, or the government of those who are ambitious for power and place. Next comes oligarchy, the government of the rich for the protection of the interests of the moneyed class. Next below that, and as a logical consequence, comes populism, which is our word for what Plato calls democracy; a government which aims to satisfy the immediate wants of everybody, regardless of moral, legal, or constitu

tional restraints. Last, and lowest of all, comes the rule of the professional politician who has thrown all pretence of regard for the public good, all consideration of honour, all loyalty to the rich and genuine sympathy for the poor to the winds, and is simply manipulating the forms of government, getting and distributing offices, collecting assessments and distributing bribes, all in the interests of his own private pocket. Between disinterested service of the public good and such unblushing pursuit of private gain, Plato says that there is no stopping place. Logically Plato is right; historically, too, he was right at the time when he was writing. Modern democracy, however, is a very different thing from the populistic democracy with which Plato was familiar and which our large cities know too well. A democracy, resting on intelligence and public spirit, diffused through rich and poor alike, was beyond Plato's profoundest dreams. That great experiment the American people, with their public-school system, and their principle of the equality of all before the law, are now trying on a gigantic scale.

Corresponding to the tyrannical state comes the tyrannical man. "The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, lustful, passionate, the best elements in him are

enslaved; and there is a small ruling part which is also the worst and the maddest. He has the soul of the slave, and the tyrannical soul must always be poor and insatiable. He is by far the most miserable of all men." "He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real servant and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility and be the flatterer of mankind; he has desires which he is truly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor if you know how to inspect the soul of him. All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions. Even as the state which he resembles, he grows worse from having power; he becomes of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more impious; he entertains and nurtures every evil sentiment, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable and thus he makes everybody else equally miserable."

VII

THE INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Plato first constructs the ideal character and shows that it consists in the righteous rule of the intelligent principle in man over the spirit and the appetites. A soul thus in harmony with itself,