I. A weak point in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into private life which is to be made by the rulers.  The magistrate is always watching and waylaying the citizens.  He is constantly to receive information against improprieties of life.  Plato does not seem to be aware that espionage can only have a negative effect.  He has not yet discovered the boundary line which parts the domain of law from that of morality or social life.  Men will not tell of one another; nor will he ever be the most honoured citizen, who gives the most frequent information about offenders to the magistrates.

As in some writers of fiction, so also in philosophers, we may observe the effect of age.  Plato becomes more conservative as he grows older, and he would govern the world entirely by men like himself, who are above fifty years of age; for in them he hopes to find a principle of stability.  He does not remark that, in destroying the freedom he is destroying also the life of the State.  In reducing all the citizens to rule and measure, he would have been depriving the Magnesian colony of those great men ’whose acquaintance is beyond all price;’ and he would have found that in the worst-governed Hellenic State, there was more of a carriere ouverte for extraordinary genius and virtue than in his own.

Plato has an evident dislike of the Athenian dicasteries; he prefers a few judges who take a leading part in the conduct of trials to a great number who only listen in silence.  He allows of two appeals—­in each case however with an increase of the penalty.  Modern jurists would disapprove of the redress of injustice being purchased only at an increasing risk; though indirectly the burden of legal expenses, which seems to have been little felt among the Athenians, has a similar effect.  The love of litigation, which is a remnant of barbarism quite as much as a corruption of civilization, and was innate in the Athenian people, is diminished in the new state by the imposition of severe penalties.  If persevered in, it is to be punished with death.

In the Laws murder and homicide besides being crimes, are also pollutions.  Regarded from this point of view, the estimate of such offences is apt to depend on accidental circumstances, such as the shedding of blood, and not on the real guilt of the offender or the injury done to society.  They are measured by the horror which they arouse in a barbarous age.  For there is a superstition in law as well as in religion, and the feelings of a primitive age have a traditional hold on the mass of the people.  On the other hand, Plato is innocent of the barbarity which would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, and he is quite aware that punishment has an eye to the future, and not to the past.  Compared with that of most European nations in the last century his penal code, though sometimes capricious, is reasonable and humane.