Thus Aristotle’s political ideal is that of a small but leisured and highly cultivated aristocracy, without large fortunes or any remarkable differences in material wealth, free from the spirit of adventure and enterprise, pursuing the arts and sciences quietly while its material needs are supplied by the labour of a class excluded from citizenship, kindly treated but without prospects. Weimar, in the days when Thackeray knew it as a lad, would apparently reproduce the ideal better than any other modern state one can think of. The object of the _Politics_ is, however, not merely to discuss the ideal state but to give practical advice to men who might be looking forward to actual political life, and would therefore largely have to be content with making the best of existing institutions. In the absence of the ideal aristocracy, Aristotle’s preference is for what he calls Polity or constitutional government, a sort of compromise between oligarchy and democracy. Of course a practical statesman may have to work with a theoretically undesirable constitution, such as an oligarchy or an unqualified democracy. But it is only in an ideal constitution that the education which makes its subject a good man, in the philosopher’s sense of the word, will also make him a good citizen. If the constitution is bad, then the education best fitted to make a man loyal to it may have to be very different from that which you would choose to make him a good man. The discussion of the kind of education desirable for the best kind of state, in which to be a loyal citizen and to be a good man are the same thing, is perhaps the most permanently valuable part of the _Politics_. Though Aristotle’s writings on "practical" philosophy have been more read in modern times than any other part of his works, they are far from being his best and most thorough performances. In no department of his thought is he quite so slavishly dependent on his master Plato as in the theory of the "good for man" and the character of "moral" excellence. No Aristotelian work is quite so commonplace in its handling of a vast subject as the _Politics_. In truth his interest in these social questions is not of the deepest. He is, in accordance with his view of the superiority of "theoretical science," entirely devoid of the spirit of the social reformer. What he really cares about is "theology" and "physics," and the fact that the objects of the educational regulations of the _Politics_ are all designed to encourage the study of these "theoretical" sciences, makes this section of the _Politics_ still one of the most valuable expositions of the aims and requirements of a "liberal" education.