The Republic
disposed, although he has suffered from evil influences, he rests at a
middle point and becomes ambitious and a lover of honour.
And now let us set another city over against another man. The next form
of government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only; nor
is it difficult to see how such a State arises. The decline begins with
the possession of gold and silver; illegal modes of expenditure are
invented; one draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches
outweigh virtue; lovers of money take the place of lovers of honour;
misers of politicians; and, in time, political privileges are confined
by law to the rich, who do not shrink from violence in order to effect
their purposes.
Thus much of the origin,—let us next consider the evils of oligarchy.
Would a man who wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad pilot because
he was rich, or refuse a good one because he was poor? And does not the
analogy apply still more to the State? And there are yet greater evils:
two nations are struggling together in one—the rich and the poor; and
the rich dare not put arms into the hands of the poor, and are
unwilling to pay for defenders out of their own money. And have we not
already condemned that State in which the same persons are warriors as
well as shopkeepers? The greatest evil of all is that a man may sell
his property and have no place in the State; while there is one class
which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely destitute. But observe
that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature
in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were
miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only
whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the
two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings
and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are
paupers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in
oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a
ruler, you will find abundance of both. And this evil state of society
originates in bad education and bad government.
Like State, like man,—the change in the latter begins with the
representative of timocracy; he walks at first in the ways of his
father, who may have been a statesman, or general, perhaps; and
presently he sees him ‘fallen from his high estate,’ the victim of
informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand of the executioner.
The lesson which he thus receives, makes him cautious; he leaves
politics, represses his pride, and saves pence. Avarice is enthroned as
his bosom’s lord, and assumes the style of the Great King; the rational
and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side, the one
immersed in calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of
wealth. The love of honour turns to love of money; the conversion is
instantaneous. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one
passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very image of
the State? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the
blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated
he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish,
breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the
power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the will,
and that his passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason.
Hence he leads a divided existence; in which the better desires mostly
prevail. But when he is contending for prizes and other distinctions,
he is afraid to incur a loss which is to be repaid only by barren
honour; in time of war he fights with a small part of his resources,
and usually keeps his money and loses the victory.
Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the
oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an
oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may
gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men of family often lose
their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city,
full of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for
revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he
passes by, and leaves his sting—that is, his money—in some other
victim; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal sum
multiplied into a family of children, and is reduced into a state of
dronage by him. The only way of diminishing the evil is either to limit
a man in his use of his property, or to insist that he shall lend at
his own risk. But the ruling class do not want remedies; they care only
for money, and are as careless of virtue as the poorest of the
citizens. Now there are occasions on which the governors and the
governed meet together,—at festivals, on a journey, voyaging or
fighting. The sturdy pauper finds that in the hour of danger he is not
despised; he sees the rich man puffing and panting, and draws the
conclusion which he privately imparts to his companions,—‘that our
people are not good for much;’ and as a sickly frame is made ill by a
mere touch from without, or sometimes without external impulse is ready
to fall to pieces of itself, so from the least cause, or with none at
all, the city falls ill and fights a battle for life or death. And
democracy comes into power when the poor are the victors, killing some
and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the
rest.
The manner of life in such a State is that of democrats; there is
freedom and plainness of speech, and every man does what is right in
his own eyes, and has his own way of life. Hence arise the most various
developments of character; the State is like a piece of embroidery of
which the colours and figures are the manners of men, and there are
many who, like women and children, prefer this variety to real beauty
and excellence. The State is not one but many, like a bazaar at which
you can buy anything. The great charm is, that you may do as you like;
you may govern if you like, let it alone if you like; go to war and
make peace if you feel disposed, and all quite irrespective of anybody
else. When you condemn men to death they remain alive all the same; a
gentleman is desired to go into exile, and he stalks about the streets
like a hero; and nobody sees him or cares for him. Observe, too, how
grandly Democracy sets her foot upon all our fine theories of
education,—how little she cares for the training of her statesmen! The
only qualification which she demands is the profession of patriotism.
Such is democracy;—a pleasing, lawless, various sort of government,
distributing equality to equals and unequals alike.
Let us now inspect the individual democrat; and first, as in the case
of the State, we will trace his antecedents. He is the son of a miserly
oligarch, and has been taught by him to restrain the love of
unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps I ought to explain this latter
term:—Necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which we cannot
do without; unnecessary pleasures are those which do no good, and of
which the desire might be eradicated by early training. For example,
the pleasures of eating and drinking are necessary and healthy, up to a
certain point; beyond that point they are alike hurtful to body and
mind, and the excess may be avoided. When in excess, they may be
rightly called expensive pleasures, in opposition to the useful ones.
And the drone, as we called him, is the slave of these unnecessary
pleasures and desires, whereas the miserly oligarch is subject only to
the necessary.
The oligarch changes into the democrat in the following manner:—The
youth who has had a miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone’s
honey; he meets with wild companions, who introduce him to every new
pleasure. As in the State, so in the individual, there are allies on
both sides, temptations from without and passions from within; there is
reason also and external influences of parents and friends in alliance
with the oligarchical principle; and the two factions are in violent
conflict with one another. Sometimes the party of order prevails, but
then again new desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of
passions gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul,
which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods
and illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into
the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if
any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes from home,
the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit no one to
enter,—there is a battle, and they gain the victory; and straightway
making alliance with the desires, they banish modesty, which they call
folly, and send temperance over the border. When the house has been
swept and garnished, they dress up the exiled vices, and, crowning them
with garlands, bring them back under new names. Insolence they call
good breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence, impudence courage.
Such is the process by which the youth passes from the necessary
pleasures to the unnecessary. After a while he divides his time
impartially between them; and perhaps, when he gets older and the
violence of passion has abated, he restores some of the exiles and
lives in a sort of equilibrium, indulging first one pleasure and then
another; and if reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good
and honourable, and others bad and vile, he shakes his head and says
that he can make no distinction between them. Thus he lives in the
fancy of the hour; sometimes he takes to drink, and then he turns
abstainer; he practises in the gymnasium or he does nothing at all;
then again he would be a philosopher or a politician; or again, he
would be a warrior or a man of business; he is
‘Every thing by starts and nothing long.’
There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all
States—tyranny and the tyrant. Tyranny springs from democracy much as
democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from excess; the one from
excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom. ‘The great natural
good of life,’ says the democrat, ‘is freedom.’ And this exclusive love
of freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the
change from democracy to tyranny. The State demands the strong wine of
freedom, and unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes
and insults them; equality and fraternity of governors and governed is
the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the State only, but
of private houses, and extends even to the animals. Father and son,
citizen and foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and young, are all on a
level; fathers and teachers fear their sons and pupils, and the wisdom
of the young man is a match for the elder, and the old imitate the
jaunty manners of the young because they are afraid of being thought
morose. Slaves are on a level with their masters and mistresses, and
there is no difference between men and women. Nay, the very animals in
a democratic State have a freedom which is unknown in other places. The
she-dogs are as good as their she-mistresses, and horses and asses
march along with dignity and run their noses against anybody who comes
in their way. ‘That has often been my experience.’ At last the citizens
become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of laws, written
or unwritten; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is
the glorious beginning of things out of which tyranny springs.
‘Glorious, indeed; but what is to follow?’ The ruin of oligarchy is the
ruin of democracy; for there is a law of contraries; the excess of
freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom