These political adjustments of Plato’s will be criticised by the practical statesman as being for the most part fanciful and ineffectual.  He will observe, first of all, that the only real check on democracy is the division into classes.  The second of the three proposals, though ingenious, and receiving some light from the apathy to politics which is often shown by the higher classes in a democracy, would have little power in times of excitement and peril, when the precaution was most needed.  At such political crises, all the lower classes would vote equally with the higher.  The subtraction of half the persons chosen at the first election by the chances of the lot would not raise the character of the senators, and is open to the objection of uncertainty, which necessarily attends this and similar schemes of double representative government.  Nor can the voters be expected to retain the continuous political interest required for carrying out such a proposal as Plato’s.  Who could select 180 persons of each class, fitted to be senators?  And whoever were chosen by the voter in the first instance, his wishes might be neutralized by the action of the lot.  Yet the scheme of Plato is not really so extravagant as the actual constitution of Athens, in which all the senators appear to have been elected by lot (apo kuamou bouleutai), at least, after the revolution made by Cleisthenes; for the constitution of the senate which was established by Solon probably had some aristocratic features, though their precise nature is unknown to us.  The ancients knew that election by lot was the most democratic of all modes of appointment, seeming to say in the objectionable sense, that ‘one man is as good as another.’  Plato, who is desirous of mingling different elements, makes a partial use of the lot, which he applies to candidates already elected by vote.  He attempts also to devise a system of checks and balances such as he supposes to have been intended by the ancient legislators.  We are disposed to say to him, as he himself says in a remarkable passage, that ’no man ever legislates, but accidents of all sorts, which legislate for us in all sorts of ways.  The violence of war and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws.’  And yet, as he adds, the true legislator is still required:  he must co-operate with circumstances.  Many things which are ascribed to human foresight are the result of chance.  Ancient, and in a less degree modern political constitutions, are never consistent with themselves, because they are never framed on a single design, but are added to from time to time as new elements arise and gain the preponderance in the state.  We often attribute to the wisdom of our ancestors great political effects which have sprung unforeseen from the accident of the situation.  Power, not wisdom, is most commonly the source of political revolutions.  And the result, as in the Roman Republic, of the co-existence of opposite elements in the same state is, not a balance of power or an equable progress of liberal principles, but a conflict of forces, of which one or other may happen to be in the ascendant.  In Greek history, as well as in Plato’s conception of it, this ’progression by antagonism’ involves reaction:  the aristocracy expands into democracy and returns again to tyranny.