[Side-note: All these studies, and this education, are common to females as well as males.] What has here been said about the male guardians and philosophers must be understood to apply equally to the female. We recognise no difference in this respect between the two sexes. Those females who have gone through the same education and have shown themselves capable of enduring the same trials as males, will participate, after fifty years of age, in the like philosophical contemplations, and in superintendence of the city.[255] [Footnote 255: Plato, Republic, vii. p. 540 C.] [Side-note: First formation of the Platonic city--how brought about: difficult, but not impossible.] I have thus shown (Sokrates pursues) how the fundamental postulate for our city may be brought about.--That philosophers, a single man or a few, shall become possessed of supreme rule: being sufficiently exalted in character to despise the vulgar gratifications of ambition, and to carry out systematically the dictates of rectitude and justice. The postulate is indeed hard to be realised--yet not impossible.[256] Such philosophical rulers, as a means for first introducing their system into a new city, will send all the inhabitants above ten years old away into the country, reserving only the children, whom they will train up in their own peculiar manners and principles. In this way the city, according to our scheme, will be first formed: when formed, it will itself be happy, and will confer inestimable benefit on the nation to which it belongs.[257] [Footnote 256: Plato, Republic, vii. p. 540 E.] [Footnote 257: Plato, Republic, vii. p. 541 A.] Plato thus assumes his city, and the individual man forming a parallel to his city, to be perfectly well constituted. Reason, the higher element, exercises steady controul: the lower elements, Energy and Appetite, both acquiesce contentedly in her right to controul, and obey her orders--the former constantly and forwardly--the latter sometimes requiring constraint by the strength of the former.] [Side-note: The city thus formed will last long, but not for ever. After a certain time, it will begin to degenerate. Stages of its degeneracy.]