But if you must have them, why not train your best men for the work, just as you train some to be doctors, and others to be lawyers, and others to be engineers? Think of taking a man’s pills just because he can show a count of noses in his favor! Think of letting a man build the world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy are the Pythagoreans of politics,—you believe in number as your god. Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered, and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to lie; your elections are a contest in flattery and prevarication. Your democracy is a theatrocracy; and woe to the genius who falls into your hands. Perhaps you like democracy because you are like democracy: all your desires are on a level; that you should respect some of them and discipline others is an idea that never enters your heads. It has never occurred to you that it takes more time and training to make a statesman than it does to make a bootblack. But statesmanship is something that can never be conferred by plebiscite; it must be pursued through the years, and must find the privilege of office without submitting to a vote. Wisdom is too subtle a thing to be felt by the coarsened senses of the mob. Your industry is wonderful because it is shot through with specialization and training; but because you reject specialization and training in filling the offices of your government the word politics has become dishonored in your mouths. And just because you will let any one be your leader no real man ever submits himself to your choice.
V
Culture and Slavery
THERE is much exaggeration here, of course, as might be expected of one whose material and social concerns were bound up with the oligarchical party at Athens, whose friends and relatives had died in battle against the armies of the democracy; whose early years had seen the democratic mismanagement of the Peloponnesian war and the growth of a disorderly individualism in Athens. But there are also lessons here for those who are strong enough to learn even from their enemies.[39] To press home these lessons at this point would take us too far afield; our plan for the moment is to follow Plato’s guidance until he has led us out into a clear view of his position.
We shall suppose such a scheme of education as Plato desires; we shall suppose that a moderate number of those who entered the lists at birth have survived test after test, have “tasted the dear delight” of philosophy for five years, and have passed safely through the ordeal of practical affairs; these men (and women, as we shall see) now automatically become the rulers of the Platonic state: let us observe them in their work and in their lives.
To the guardians it is a matter of first principles that the function of the state—and therefore their function—is a positive function; they are to lead the people, and not merely to serve as an umpire of disputes. They are the protagonists of a social evolution that has at last become conscious; they are resolved that henceforth social organization shall be a far-seeing plan and not a haphazard flux of expediencies of control. They know that they are asked to be experts in foresight and coördination; they will legislate accordingly, and will no more think of asking the people what laws should be passed than a physician would ask the people what measures should be taken to preserve the public health.
And first of all they will control population; they will consider this to be the indispensable prerequisite to a planned development. The state must not be larger than is consistent with unity and with the efficacy of central control. People may mate as they will,—that is their own concern; but they must understand quite clearly that procreation is an affair of the state. Children must be born not of love but of science; marriage will be a temporary relation, allowing frequent remating for the sake of beautiful offspring. Men shall not have children before thirty, nor after forty. Deformed or incurably diseased children will be exposed to die. Children must leave their mothers at birth, and be brought up by the state. Women must be freed from bondage to their children, if women are to be real citizens, interested in the public weal, and loving not a narrow family but the great community.
For women are to be citizens; it would be foolish to let half the people be withdrawn from interest in and service to the state. Women will receive all the educational advantages offered to men; they will even wrestle with them, naked, in the games. If any of them—and surely some of them will—pass all the tests, they shall be guardians, too. People are to be divided, for political purposes, not by difference of sex, but by difference of capacity. Some women may be fit not for housekeeping but for ruling,—let them rule; some men may be fit not for ruling but for housekeeping,—let them keep house.
Without family, and without clearly ascertainable relationship between any man and any child, there can be no individual inheritance of property; the guardians will have all things in common, and without Tertullian’s exception.[40] Shut off from the possibility of personal bequests or of “founding a family,” the guardians will have no stimulus to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. There will be no money in use among them; they will live a hard simple life, devoted to the problems of communal defence and development. Freed from family ties, from private property and luxury, from violence and litigation, and all distinctions of Mine and Thine, they will have no reason to oppress the workers in order to lay up stores for themselves; they will be happy in the exercise of their high responsibilities and powers. They will not be tempted to legislate for the good of their own class rather than for the good of the community; their joy will lie in the creation of a prosperous and harmonious state.
Under their direction will be the soldiers, also specially selected and trained, and supported by the workers. But these workers?
They will be those who have been eliminated in the tests. The demands of specialization will have condemned them to labor for those who have the gift of guidance. They shall have no voice in the direction of the state; that, as said, is a reward for demonstrated capacity, and not a “natural right.”[41] Frankly, there are some people who are not fit to be other than slaves; and to varnish that fact with oratory about “the dignity of labor” is merely to give an instance of the indignities to which a democratic politician will descend. These workers are incapable of a subtler happiness than that of knowing that they are doing what they are fit to do, and are contributing to the maintenance of communal prosperity. Such as they are, these workers, like the other members of the state, will find their highest possibilities of development in such an organized society. And to make sure that they will not rebel, they will have been taught by “royal lies” that their position and function in the state have been ordained by the gods. There is no sense in shivering at this quite judicious juggling with the facts; there are times when truth is a barrier to content, and must be set aside. Physicians have been known to cure ailments with a timely lie. Labor stimulated by such deception may be slavery, if you wish to call it so; but it is the inevitable condition of order, and order is the inevitable condition of culture and communal success.