We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts. The "rule" of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy, though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been incumbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands; and we have but to walk through the classical department of the Louvre or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance and the like did but enhance, could not chill or impoverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. In proportion to what we know of the minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, "skilled" to the utmost degree in all its applications. Those who prosecute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch," in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal [251] liberties as seem natural and right, and are not really "illiberal," for those who labour all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their service some measure of the compulsion which shapes the action of our kings and soldiers to such effective music. With more or less of asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule. They represent, as we saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it. Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps, perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable them the more readily to exchange their produce (nomisma tês allagês heneka)+ working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would constitute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul--to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its "golden" humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of its worship, of its intercourse with the gods.