Such were the evil conditions of the present when one citizen despoiled his fellow and every city its neighbor. It had been different in the past. Before the introduction of luxurious tastes to stimulate inventions and of coined money to destroy a sense for the natural limits of wealth, men had "worked in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot,[52] but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They fed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they served up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children feasted, drinking of the wine which they had made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. They took care that their families did not exceed their means: having an eye to poverty or war." But it was not to an age of such rude simplicity that Plato would recall his contemporaries. He would, indeed, restore the virtues which existed among the early country folk before the rise of modern cities and the establishment of the capitalistic régime; but, while hostile to transmarine commerce, retail trade, industries, banking, interest, and all other accompaniments of interchange between cities, which he regarded as generally undesirable and provocative of wars and conquests, he imagines his ideal people in possession of city culture and the articles of luxury and convenience secured through the capitalistic organization. His citizens are, indeed, farmers, but they are gentlemen farmers, who have their money invested in land and slaves and live on their dividends, free to devote their leisure to athletic, intellectual, and other worthy pursuits. They will be free from greed of wealth because they all possess a competency, which Plato defines as enough to live "temperately," Aristotle as enough to live "with liberality and temperance." Neither philosopher thinks of poverty except as the ordainer of body- and soul-destroying work, work which degrades those who have to perform it, and makes slavery their natural condition. Plato and Aristotle would make all tillers of the soil and workers at the trades and crafts slaves and aliens. They were to exist simply to provide the conditions of "good living" for their masters or superiors; whereupon "we must not conceal from ourselves," says Aristotle,[53] "that a country as large as the Babylonian or some other of boundless extent will be required if it is to support five thousand citizens in idleness." Even in America, where, to use the current formula, ten per cent of the people own ninety per cent of the wealth, the economic situation proposed as ideal by the most enlightened reformers of the fourth century B.C. has hardly been reached. Whether Plato failed to realize that he was condemning nine tenths of people to perpetual bondage and ignorance; or, realizing it, refused to think