nor land; nor any other article; nor, finally, must they exercise a trade. Thirdly, the administration of affairs, the executive power, and the supreme rank, are vested in the persons of the highest military officers-those who rise to that station by seniority and by extraordinary merit. This is very vaguely developed; but enough exists to show that the form of polity would be a martial aristocracy, a qualified ' stratocracy. In this state, it is not so much true that an opening or a temptation is offered to a martial tyranny, as that, in fact, such a tyranny is planted and rooted from the first, with all the organs of administration at its disposal.

Lastly, in what way is the succession to be regulated through the several ranks and functions of the state? Not exactly, or under positive settlement, by castes, or an Egyptian succession of a son to his father's trade, &c. This is denounced in the sense of an unconditional or unbending system; for it is admitted that fathers of talent may have incompetent sons, and stupid fathers may have sons of brilliant promise. But, on the whole, it seems to be assumed that, amongst the highest, or martial order, the care dedicated to the selection of

the parents will ensure children of similar excellence,

"Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,"

and that amongst the artisans one average level of mediocrity will usually prevail; in which case, the advantage of personal training to the art, under a domestic tutor who never leaves him, must give such a bias to the children of the citizens for their several pursuits, as will justify the principle of hereditary succession. Still, in any case where this expectation fails, a door is constantly kept open for meeting any unusual indication of nature, by corresponding changes in the destiny of the young people. Nature, therefore, in the last resort, will regulate the successior, since the law interposes no further than in confirmation of that order in the succession which it is presumed that nature will have settled by clear expressions of fitness. But in whatever case nature indicates determinately some different predisposition in the individual, then the law gives way; for, says Plato, with emphasis, "the paramount object in my commonwealth is that every human creature should find his proper level, and every man settle into that place for which his natural qualities have fitted him."

These last words are not a mere flourish of rhetoric. It is, according to Plato's view, the very distinguishing feature in his polity, that each man occupies his own natural place. Accordingly, it is the business of this book to favour that view by a sort of fanciful analogy between what we in modern times call the four cardinal virtues, and the four capital varieties of state polity, and also between these virtues and the constituent order in a community. This, however, may be looked upon as no step in advance towards the development of his own Republic, but rather as a halt for the purpose of looking back upon what has been already developed."

The cardinal virtues, as we see them adopted nearly four hundred years after Plato by Cicero, are prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. The first will find its illustration, ac cording to Plato, in the governing part of a state; the second in the

defending part, or the military; the third in the relation between all the parts; but the fourth has its essence in assigning to every individual, and to every order, the appropriate right, whether that be property, duty, function, or rank. Other states, therefore, present some analogy to the three first virtues, according to the predominant object which they pursue. But his own, as Plato contends, is a model analogous to the very highest of the virtues, or justice; for that in this state only the object is kept up, as a transcendant object, of suffering no man to assume functions by mere inheritance, but to every individual assigning that office and station for which nature seems to have prepared his qualifications.

This principle, so broadly expressed, would seem to require more frequent disturbances in the series of hereditary employments than Plato had contemplated in his last book. Accord

ingly, he again acknowledges the importance of vigilantly reviewing the several qualifications of the citizens. The rest of the book is chiefly occupied with a psychological enquiry into a problem sometimes discussed in modern times, (but thoroughly alien to the political problem of Plato;) viz. whether, upon dividing the internal constitution of man into three elements the irascible passions, the appetites of desire, and the rational

principle-we are warranted in supposing three separate substances or hypostases in the human system, or merely three separate offices of some common substance: whether, in short, these differences are organic, or simply functional. But, besides that the discussion is both obscure and conducted by scholastic hair-splitting, it has too slight a relation to the main theme before us, to justify our digressing for what is so little interesting.

At this point of the conversation, Adeimantus, at the suggestion of another person, recalls Socrates to the consideration of that foul blot upon his theory which concerns the matrimonial connexions of the army. Not only were these to commence in a principle of unmitigated sensuality-selection of wives by public, not by individual choice, and with a single reference to physical qualities of strength, size, agility-but, which riveted the brutal tendencies of such a law, the wives, if wives they could be called, and the children that might arise from such promiscuous connexions, were to be held the common property of the order. Ties of any separate kindness, or affection for this woman or for that child, were forbidden as a species of treason; and if (as in rare cases might happen) after all they should arise, the parties to such holy, but, Platonically speaking, such criminal feelings, must conceal them from all the worldmust cherish them as a secret cancer at the heart, or as a martyrdom repeated in every hour. We represent marriages under the beautiful idea of unions. But these Platonic marriages would be the foulest dispersions of the nuptial sanctities. We call them selfdedications of one human creature to another, through the one sole means by which nature has made it possible for any exclusive dedication to be effected. But these Platonic marriages would be a daily renovation of disloyalty, revolt, and mutual abjuration. We, from human society, transfer a reflex of human charities upon inferior natures, when we see the roe-deer, for instance, gathering not into herds and communities like their larger brethren, the fallow-deer or the gigantic red-deer, but into

families-two parents every where followed by their own fawns, loving and beloved. Plato, from the brutal world, aud from that aspect of the brutal world in which it is most brutal, transfers a feature of savage gregariousness which would ultimately disorganize as much as it would immediately degrade. In fact, the mere feuds of jealousy, frantic hatred, and competitions of authority, growing out of such an institution, would break up the cohesion of Plato's republic within seven years. We all know of such institutions as actually realized; one case of former ages is recorded by Cæsar, Strabo, &c.; another of the present day exists amongst the ranges of the Himalaya, and has been brought by the course of our growing empire within British control. But they are, and have been, connected with the most abject condition in other respects; and probably it would be found, if such societies were not merely traversed by the glasses of philosophers in one stage of their existence, but steadily watched through a succession of generations, that it is their very necessity rapidly to decay, either by absorption into more powerful societies, built on sounder principles, or by inevitable self-extinction. Certain it is, that a society so constituted through all its orders, could breed no conservative or renovating impulses, since all motives of shame, glory, emulation, would operate upon a system untuned, or pitched in a far lower key, wherever sexual love and the tenderness of exclusive preferences were forbidden by law.

Adeimantus, by thus calling for a revision of a principle so revolting, impersonates to the reader his own feelings. He, like the young Athen

reserve *of Grecian society, combined, as in this place it is, with levity so perfect. Plato repudiates this scruple with something like contempt. He contends that it is all custom and use which regulate such feelings, and that a new training made operative, will soon generate a new standard of propriety. Now, with our better views on such points, a plain man would tell the philosopher, that although use, no doubt, will reconcile us to much, still, after all, a better and a worse in such things does exist, previously to any use at all, one way or the other; and that it is the business of philosophy to ascertain this better and worse per se, so as afterwards to apply the best gravitation of this moral agency, called custom, in a way to uphold a known benefit, not to waste it upon a doubtful one, still less upon one which, to the first guiding sensibilities of man, appears dangerous and shocking. If, hereafter, in these martial women, Plato should, under any dilemma, have to rely upon feminine qualities of delicacy or tenderness, he might happen to find that, with the characteristic and sexual qualities of his women, he had uprooted all the rest of their distinguishing graces; that for a single purpose, arbitrary even in his system, he had sacrificed a power that could not be replaced. All this, however, is dismissed as a trivial scruple. 2dly, There is another scruple, however, which weighs more heavily with Plato, and receives a more pointed answer. The objection to a female soldier or a gladiatrix, might be applied on a far different principle-not to what seems, but to what actually is -not by moral sentiment, but by physiology. Habit might make us callous to the spectacle of unfeminine exposures; but habit cannot create qualities of muscular strength, hardi

hood, or patient endurance, where nature has denied them. These qualities may be improved, certainly, in women, as they may in men ; but still, as the improved woman in her athletic character must still be compared with the improved man, the scale, the proportions of difference, will be kept at the old level. And thus the old prejudice—that women are not meant (because not fitted by nature) for war. like tasks-will revolve upon us in the shape of a philosophic truth.

To a certain extent, Plato indirectly admits this, for (as will be seen) practically he allows for it in his subsequent institutions. But he restricts the principle of female inaptitude for war by the following suggestion :The present broad distribution of the human species, according to which courage and the want of couragemuscular strength and weakness-are. made to coincide with mere sexual distinctions, he rejects as false-not groundless-for there is a perceptible tendency to that difference-but still false for ordinary purposes. It may have a popular truth. But here, when the question is about philosophic pos sibilities and extreme ideals, he insists upon substituting for this popular generality a more severe valuation of the known facts. He proposes, therefore, to divide the human race upon another principle. Men, though it is the characteristic tendency of their sex to be courageous, are not all courageous; men, though sexually it is their tendency to be strong, are not all strong many are so; but some, in the other extreme, are both timid and feeble: others, again, present us with a compromise between both extremes. By a parity of logic, women, though sexually and constitutionally unwarlike, pass through the same graduated range; upon which scale,

the middle qualities in them may answer to the lower qualities in the other sex-the higher to the middle. It is possible, therefore, to make a selection amongst the entire female population, of such as are fitted to take their share in garrison duty, in the duty of military posts or of sentries, and even, to a certain extent, in the extreme labours of the field. Plato countenances the belief that, allowing for the difference in muscular power of women, considered as animals, (a mere difference of degree,) there is no essential difference, as to power and capacities, between the human male and the female. Considering the splendour of his name, (weighty we cannot call a man's au thority whom so few profess to have read, but imposing at the least,) it is astonishing that in the agitation stirred by the modern brawlers, from Mary Wollstoncraft, downwards, in behalf of female pretensions to power, no more use should have been drawn from the disinterested sanction of Plato to these wild innovations. However, it will strike many, that even out of that one inferiority conceded by Plato, taken in connexion with the frequent dependencies of wives and mothers up. on human forbearance and human aids, in a way irreconcilable with war, those inferences might be forced one after one, which would soon restore (as a direct logical consequence) that state of female dependency which at present nature and providence so beautifully accomplish through the gentlest of human feeling. Even Plato is obliged in practice to allow rather more on account of his one sole concession than his promises would have warranted: for he stipulates that his young gladiatrices and other figurantes in the palestra, shall not be put upon difficult or dangerous trials; living in our day, he would have introduced into H. M.'s navy a class of midship women; but would have exempted them, we presume, from all the night watches, and from going aloft. This, however, might have been mere consideration for the tenderness of youth. But again, in mature life, though he orders that the wives and the children shall march with the armed force to the seat of the campaign, and on the day of battle shall make their appearance in the rear, (an unpleasant arrangement in

our day of flying artillery and rocket brigade,) he does not insist on their mixing in the mêlée. Their influence with the fighting division of the army, is to lie in their visible presence. But surely at this point, Plato overlooked the elaborate depression of that influence which his own system had been nursing. Personal presence of near female relations, whether in storms at sea, or in battles, has always been supposed to work more mischief by distracting the commander's attention, than good by reminding him of his domestic ties. And since the loss of an East Indiaman, (the Halsewell,) about sixty years ago, in part ascribed to the presence of the captain's daughter, the rules of the British service, we believe, have circumscribed the possibility of such very doubtful influences. But, in Plato's Republic, the influences must have been much more equivocal. A number of women and a number of children are suppos ed to be ranged on an eminence in the background. The women were undoubtedly, or had been, mothers: but to which of the children individually, and whether to any living child, was beyond their power to guess. Giving the fact that any child to which, in former years, they might give birth, were still in exist ence, then probably that child would be found amongst the young column of battle-gazers on the ground. But, as to the men, even this conditional knowledge is impossible. Multiplied precautions have been taken, that it may be impossible. From the moment of birth the child has been removed to an establishment where the sternest measures are enforced to confound it beyond all power of recognition with the crowd of previous children. The object is to place a bar between this recognition and every body; the mother and all others alike. Can a cup of water be recovered when poured off into the Danube? Equally impossible, if Plato's intentions are fulfilled, to recover traces of identification with respect to any one of the public children. The public family, therefore, of wives and children are present, but with what probable result upon the sensibilities of the men, we leave the reader to determine, when we have put him in possession of Plato's motive to all this unnatural interference with human affections.