to establish, since
nature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in the
few fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men to
that situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they find
no influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. It
is clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family or
greatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to that
medium where lay the creature's spiritual affinities; his origins would
be disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast
his disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate,
conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning,
nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have
seen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in
that ideal direction.

Even less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require a
moral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful.

A motive which now generates political democracy, impatience of
sacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into its
opposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art or
of religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs of
the state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially;
while if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensive
development which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need to
forget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He must
find his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; and
when, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he must
find an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complex
society to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He must
learn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no reward
save his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country's
greatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a close
organisation and much training; and as military and religious
timocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so an
industrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, which
would make large inroads upon personal freedom.

[Sidenote: The masses would have to be plebeian in position and
patrician in feeling.]

The question here suggests itself whether such a cit