sfy existing desires and give people a 'good time'. It does not
distinguish between higher and lower. Any one man is as good as another,
and so is any impulse or any idea. Consequently the commoner have the
pull. Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he now sees,
have been ministers to mob desires; they have 'filled the city with
harbours and docks and walls and revenues and such-like trash, without
Sophrosyne and righteousness'. The sage or saint has no place in
practical politics. He would be like a man in a den of wild beasts. Let
him and his like seek shelter as best they can, standing up behind some
wall while the storm of dust and sleet rages past. The world does not
want truth, which is all that he could give it. It goes by appearances
and judges its great men with their clothes on and their rich relations
round them. After death, the judges will judge them naked, and alone;
and then we shall see![83:1]

Yet, in spite of all this, the child of the fifth century cannot keep
his mind from politics. The speculations which would be scouted by the
mass in the marketplace can still be discussed with intimate friends and
disciples, or written in books for the wise to read. Plato's two longest
works are attempts to construct an ideal society; first, what may be
called a City of Righteousness, in the _Republic_; and afterwards in
his old age, in the _Laws_, something more like a City of Refuge,
uncontaminated by the world; a little city on a hill-top away in Crete,
remote from commerce and riches and the 'bitter and corrupting sea'
which carries them; a city where life shall move in music and discipline
and reverence for the things that are greater than man, and the songs
men sing shall be not common songs but the preambles of the city's laws,
showing their purpose and their principle; where no wall will be needed
to keep out the possible enemy, because the courage and temperance of
the citizens will be wall enough, and if war comes the women equally
with the men 'will fight for their young, as birds do'.

This hope is very like despair; but, such as it is, Plato's thought is
always directed towards the city. No other form of social life ever
tempts him away, and he anticipates no insuperable difficulty in keeping
the city in the right path if once he can get it started right. The
first step, the necessary revolution, is what makes the difficulty. And
he sees only one way. In real life he had supported the cons