citizens, in which almost every one would know and become known to everybody else, as in our own vast population.  Among ourselves we are very far from allowing every man to charge what he pleases.  Of many things the prices are fixed by law.  Do we not often hear of wages being adjusted in proportion to the profits of employers?  The objection to regulating them by law and thus avoiding the conflicts which continually arise between the buyers and sellers of labour, is not so much the undesirableness as the impossibility of doing so.  Wherever free competition is not reconcileable either with the order of society, or, as in the case of adulteration, with common honesty, the government may lawfully interfere.  The only question is,—­Whether the interference will be effectual, and whether the evil of interference may not be greater than the evil which is prevented by it.

He would prohibit beggars, because in a well-ordered state no good man would be left to starve.  This again is a prohibition which might have been easily enforced, for there is no difficulty in maintaining the poor when the population is small.  In our own times the difficulty of pauperism is rendered far greater, (1) by the enormous numbers, (2) by the facility of locomotion, (3) by the increasing tenderness for human life and suffering.  And the only way of meeting the difficulty seems to be by modern nations subdividing themselves into small bodies having local knowledge and acting together in the spirit of ancient communities (compare Arist.  Pol.)

V. Regarded as the framework of a polity the Laws are deemed by Plato to be a decline from the Republic, which is the dream of his earlier years.  He nowhere imagines that he has reached a higher point of speculation.  He is only descending to the level of human things, and he often returns to his original idea.  For the guardians of the Republic, who were the elder citizens, and were all supposed to be philosophers, is now substituted a special body, who are to review and amend the laws, preserving the spirit of the legislator.  These are the Nocturnal Council, who, although they are not specially trained in dialectic, are not wholly destitute of it; for they must know the relation of particular virtues to the general principle of virtue.  Plato has been arguing throughout the Laws that temperance is higher than courage, peace than war, that the love of both must enter into the character of the good citizen.  And at the end the same thought is summed up by him in an abstract form.  The true artist or guardian must be able to reduce the many to the one, than which, as he says with an enthusiasm worthy of the Phaedrus or Philebus, ’no more philosophical method was ever devised by the wit of man.’  But the sense of unity in difference can only be acquired by study; and Plato does not explain to us the nature of this study, which we may reasonably infer, though there is a remarkable omission of the word, to be akin to the dialectic of the Republic.