Well, the people will “produce corn and wine and clothes and shoes and build houses for themselves.... They will work in summer commonly stript and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley and wheat, baking the wheat and kneading the flour, making noble puddings and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or clean leaves; themselves reclining the while upon beds of yew or myrtle boughs. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and having the praises of the gods on their lips, living in sweet society, and having a care that their families do not exceed their means; for they will have an eye to poverty or war.” So Socrates, in this dialogue on the Republic, describes to his hearers the essential physical elements of the good life. One of his hearers, Glaucon, asks him to elaborate it a little, for Socrates has limited himself to bare essentials. It is the same sort of objection, by the way, that M. Poincaré, the physicist, made to the philosophy of Tolstoy. Socrates answers that a good state would have the healthy constitution which he has just described; but that he has no objection to looking at an “inflamed constitution.” What Socrates describes as an inflamed constitution is a mode of life which all the people of Western Europe and America at the present day--no matter what their religion, economic status, or political creed may be--believe in with almost a single mind; and so, although it is the opposite of Plato’s ideal state, I go on to present it, for the light it throws on our own institutions and habits. The unjust state comes into existence, says Plato through the mouth of Socrates, by the multiplication of wants and superfluities. As a result of increasing wants, we must enlarge our borders, for the original healthy state is too small. Now the city will fill up with a multitude of callings which go beyond those required by any natural want; there will be a host of parasites and “supers”; and our country, which was big enough to support the original inhabitants, will want a slice of our neighbor’s land for pasture and tillage; and they will want a slice of ours if, like ourselves, they exceed the limits of necessity and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth. “And then we shall go to war--that will be the next thing.” The sum of this criticism is that Plato saw clearly that an ideal community must have a common physical standard of living; and that boundless wealth or unlimited desires and gratifications had nothing to do with a good standard. The good was what was necessary; and what was necessary was not, essentially, many goods.