As soon as people began to live together in communities, some of the people wanted the community properly organized and governed. They {174} thought everything belonging to the place in which they lived should be carried on in the best, most comfortable way, with justice for everybody. But, unfortunately, there have always been some people who want the best only for themselves, and are not willing to be just to other people. In our own natures, many of us find a conflict between desiring to be just to others, and yet wishing a great deal for ourselves. We can imagine what a long, long story, or history there is in politics. Politics have to do with the government of communities, towns and cities and nations, and finally all nations, since all nations are beginning to be willing to agree among themselves. For a very long time, perhaps always, people have dreamed of perfect organization and perfect government. One of the most famous books ever written on the subject of this hoped-for perfect government is the work of the Greek philosopher Plato who had been taught by Socrates. The book is called _The Republic of Plato_ and it contains the teaching of Socrates. You may read in the last sentences of the ninth book of _The Republic of Plato_, a description of the perfect city. Socrates had been explaining to his pupils that the man of understanding will take part in everything which will make him a better man, and will shun what may make him less good. So he will take part in politics. _The Republic_ is written in the form of question and answer. Finally Socrates says that the pattern of the perfect city is perhaps laid up in heaven, but that, {175} as far as he can, the man of understanding will follow its practices. It would scarcely be possible to make a complete list of famous men who have been statesmen or politicians, because the list would be so long. But in this chapter we can choose a few names of men who have been political leaders in Great Britain, Canada, and the British Empire. A political leader generally is a speaker or orator. Nothing, possibly, is more thrilling than to listen to a great speech. Read carefully the few political sentences which follow here, and see if you do not experience a thrill, a sense that here is something that belongs to you. The first sentences quoted were spoken by William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in the House of Lords, 1770. Pitt, before he became a member of the British House of Commons, had been a soldier. "I am now suspected of coming forward, in the decline of life, in the anxious pursuit of wealth and power, which it is impossible for me to enjoy. Be it so; there is one ambition at least which I ever will acknowledge, which I will not renounce but with my life--it is the ambition of delivering to my posterity those rights of freedom which I have received from my ancestors. I am not now pleading the cause of an individual, but of every freeholder in England."