principle of excellence in
a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses
them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such
arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little
tinker,[117] who has scraped together money, and has got his release
from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged
out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has
fallen into poor and helpless estate.

Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working
lawyer,[118] and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from
his youth up has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked
of soul, encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough
to rely on justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse,
for help out of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this
poor creature is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a
particle of soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in
his own esteem.

One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
were alone in honor, and the humble work of the world was done by
slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majesty[119] consists
in work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of
such plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
such as that of the United States.

Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the
ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the
priestly or philosophical class were alone in honor, and the really
useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for
persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from
Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the
warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held