[235] "THE Republic," as we may realise it mentally within the limited proportions of some quite imaginable Greek city, is the protest of Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more imperishable still, against the principle of flamboyancy or fluidity in things, and in men's thoughts about them. Political "ideals" may provide not only types for new states, but also, in humbler function, a due corrective of the errors, thus renewing the life, of old ones. But like other medicines the corrective or critical ideal may come too late, too near the natural end of things. The theoretic attempt made by Plato to arrest the process of disintegration in the life of Athens, of Greece, by forcing it back upon a simpler and more strictly Hellenic type, ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory. It comes of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the [236] course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic, though they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now justice, now the ideal state, now the analysis of the individual soul, or the nature of a true philosopher, or his right education, or the law of political change, may seem to emerge as the proper subject of the whole book. It is thus incidentally, and by way of setting forth the definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big letters, that the constitution of the typically Right State is introduced into what, according to one of its traditional titles-- Peri Dikaiosynês +--might actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice. But tod' ên hôs eoike prooimion+--the discussion of the theory of the abstract and invisible rightness was but to introduce the practical architect, the creator of the right state. Plato then assumes rather than demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual consciousness and the social aggregate, passes lightly backwards and forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, of the one to those of the other, from you and me to the "colossal man," whose good or bad qualities, being written up there on a larger scale, are easier to read, and if one may say so, "once in bricks and mortar," though but on paper, is lavish of a world as it should be. A strange world in some ways! Let us look from the small type of the individual to the monumental [237] inscription on those high walls, as he proposes; while his fancy wandering further and further, over tower and temple, its streets and the people in them, as if forgetful of his original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought of the City of the Perfect.