tion, and
physical accidents make a military state necessary; but his absorption
in current Greek questions made him neglect the initial question of all,
namely, how a non-military and non-competitive state might be
established, or rather how the remedial functions of the state might be
forestalled by natural justice and rendered unnecessary. The violence
which such a fallen ideal, with its iniquitous virtues, does to humanity
appeared only too clearly in the sequel, when Platonism took refuge in
the supernatural. The whole pagan world was convicted of injustice and
the cities for whose glory the greatest heroes had lived and died were
abandoned with horror. Only in a catacomb or a hermitage did there seem
to be any room for the soul. This revulsion, perverse in its own way,
expressed rightly enough the perversity of that unjust justice, those
worldly and arbitrary virtues, and that sad happiness which had enslaved
the world.

[Sidenote: The doom of ancient republics.]

Plato could never have answered the question whether his Republic had a
right to exist and to brush aside all other commonwealths; he could
never have justified the ways of man to the rest of creation nor (what
is more pertinent) to man's more plastic and tenderer imagination. The
initial impulses on which his Republic is founded, which make war,
defensive and aggressive, the first business of the state, are not
irresistible impulses, they do not correspond to ultimate ends. Physical
life cannot justify itself; it cannot be made the purpose of those
rational faculties which it generates; these, on the contrary, are its
own end. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition a
more general prosperity; the purpose of personal life ideal
achievements. A polity which should not tend to abolish private lusts,
competition, and war would be an irrational polity. The organisation
which the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices they
imposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, have to
be repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations are
citizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliating
inwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, when
contact with them is inevitable, into friends. Duty and co-operation
must extend as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being to
bring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render it
self-perpetuatin