_Republic_
the dissatisfaction is not limited to merely economic conditions. In his
examination of the body politic there is hardly any part which he can
pronounce to be healthy. He would alter the life of the citizens of his
state from the very moment of birth. Children are to be taken away from
their parents and nurtured under the supervision of the state. The old
nursery tales, "the blasphemous nonsense with which mothers fool the
manhood out of their children," are to be suppressed. Dramatic and
imitative poetry are not to be allowed. Education, marriage, the number
of births, the occupations of the citizens are to be controlled by the
guardians or heads of the state. The most perfect equality of conditions
and careers is to be preserved; the women are to have similar training
with the men, no careers and no ambition are to be forbidden to them;
the inequalities and rivalries between rich and poor are to cease,
because all will be provided for by the state. Other cities are divided
against themselves. "Any ordinary city, however small, is in fact two
cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, at war with one
another" (_Republic_, bk. iv. p. 249, Jowett's translation). But this
ideal state is to be a perfect unit; although the citizens are divided
into classes according to their capacity and ability, there is none of
the exclusiveness of birth, and no inequality is to break the accord
which binds all the citizens, both male and female, together into one
harmonious whole. The marvellous comprehensiveness of the scheme for the
government of this ideal state makes it belong as much to the modern as
to the ancient world. Many of the social problems to which Plato draws
attention are yet unsolved, and some are in process of solution in the
direction indicated by him. He is not appalled by the immensity of the
task which he has sketched out for himself and his followers. He admits
that there are difficulties to be overcome, but he says in a sort of
parenthesis, "Nothing great is easy." He refuses to be satisfied with
half measures and patchwork reforms. "Enough, my friend! but what is
enough while anything remains wanting?" These sentences indicate the
spirit in which philosophical as distinguished from practical communists
from the time of Plato till to-day have undertaken to reconstruct human
society.

Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_ has very many of the characteristics of _The
Republic_. There is in it the sam