not found that considerable portions of virtue are at variance with one
another, and give rise to a similar opposition in the characters who are
endowed with them?

YOUNG SOCRATES: True.

STRANGER: Let us consider a further point.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What is it?

STRANGER: I want to know, whether any constructive art will make
any, even the most trivial thing, out of bad and good materials
indifferently, if this can be helped? does not all art rather reject the
bad as far as possible, and accept the good and fit materials, and from
these elements, whether like or unlike, gathering them all into one,
work out some nature or idea?

YOUNG SOCRATES: To, be sure.

STRANGER: Then the true and natural art of statesmanship will never
allow any State to be formed by a combination of good and bad men, if
this can be avoided; but will begin by testing human natures in play,
and after testing them, will entrust them to proper teachers who are the
ministers of her purposes--she will herself give orders, and maintain
authority; just as the art of weaving continually gives orders and
maintains authority over the carders and all the others who prepare the
material for the work, commanding the subsidiary arts to execute the
works which she deems necessary for making the web.

YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true.

STRANGER: In like manner, the royal science appears to me to be the
mistress of all lawful educators and instructors, and having this
queenly power, will not permit them to train men in what will produce
characters unsuited to the political constitution which she desires to
create, but only in what will produce such as are suitable. Those
which have no share of manliness and temperance, or any other virtuous
inclination, and, from the necessity of an evil nature, are violently
carried away to godlessness and insolence and injustice, she gets rid of
by death and exile, and punishes them with the greatest of disgraces.

YOUNG SOCRATES: That is commonly said.

STRANGER: But those who are wallowing in ignorance and baseness she bows
under the yoke of slavery.

YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite right.

STRANGER: The rest of the citizens, out of whom, if they have education,
something noble may be made, and who are capable of being united by the
statesman, the kingly art blends and weaves together; taking on the one
hand those whose natures tend rather to courage, which is the stronger
element and may be regarded as the warp, and on the other