When one undertakes to talk about government he is drawn instinctively to some historic models. As thinking persons realized in every age the insufficiency of contemporaneous governments, there has scarcely been a time when the academic reformer was wanting. Certain ages may have lacked poets--ours is said to be unpoetic and prosaic, and to await its poet-prophet--but the academic idealist who could say, Go to, let us build a government, has been generally at hand. The dreams of the illuminated ones who have sought, by rule and theory, to make the crooked straight, to convert mankind into angels by legal enactment, are among the most pleasing, if abortive, works of genius. Some of the noblest spirits of the race have made this illusory effort. Plato, that splendid genius, in whose brain was wrapped the subtle essence which gave to Hellenic art and literature their incomparable charm, found a congenial theme in painting his ideal Republic. It was a beautiful attempt to develop a state based upon Socratic thought. He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out. Plato could not escape the Time-Spirit. The Platonic Republic was his Athens idealized. "The very age and body of the time" gave to the philosopher's dream its form and pressure. The actual Hellenic Republics were not based upon the rights of man; a few ruled over a nation of proletariats and slaves. When they came into rough contact with the vigorous Roman civilization, they were shattered like iridescent bubbles. Even so wise-browed a philosopher as Plato failed to recognize sufficiently the human element. His imaginary republic was air-drawn, fantastic; a philosophic dream, with little grasp on life's realities. It was not broad-based. It did not recognize sufficiently the law of growth. It had no place in our work-a-day world. It interests us now chiefly from the superb literary skill with which it was constructed; a prodigy of intellect and art. But it was not the Democratic Ideal.