of brass and iron,
then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of
the ruler must not be pitiful towards his child because he has
to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan;
just as there may be others sprung from the artisan class, who
are raised to honour, and become guardians and auxiliaries.
For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the
State, it will then be destroyed.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: "The Dialogues of Plato." Translated into English, with
Analysis and Introduction, by B. Jowett, M.A. Vol. ii. p. 243.]

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against
truth; and the lapse of more than two thousand years has not weakened
the force of these wise words. Nor is it necessary that, as Plato
suggests, society should provide functionaries expressly charged with
the performance of the difficult duty of picking out the men of brass
from those of silver and gold. Educate, and the latter will certainly
rise to the top; remove all those artificial props by which the brass
and iron folk are kept at the top, and, by a law as sure as that of
gravitation, they will gradually sink to the bottom. We have all
known noble lords who would have been coachmen, or gamekeepers, or
billiard-markers, if they had not been kept afloat by our social
corks; we have all known men among the lowest ranks, of whom everyone
has said, "What might not that man have become, if he had only had a
little education?"

And who that attends, even in the most superficial way, to the
conditions upon which the stability of modern society--and especially
of a society like ours, in which recent legislation has placed
sovereign authority in the hands of the masses, whenever they are
united enough to wield their power--can doubt that every man of high
natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a
danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to the people
who fire it? Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an
explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which
should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small
that the rocket will simply run a-muck among friends and foes. What
gives force to the socialistic movement which is now stirring
European society to its depths, but a determination on the part of the
naturally able men among the proletariat, to put an end, somehow or
other, to the misery and degr