All these regulations, of course, are for the purpose of keeping the Guardians disinterested. Plato believed that the majority of people did not know how to mind public business; for it seemed to him that the ordering of a community’s life required a measure of science which the common man could not possibly possess. Indeed, in a city of a thousand men he did not see the possibility of getting as many as fifty men who would be sufficiently well versed in what we should today call sociology to deal intelligently with public affairs--for there would scarcely be that many first-rate draughts players. At the same time, if the government is to be entrusted to a few, the few must be genuinely disinterested. If they possessed lands and houses and money in a private way they would become landlords and farmers instead of Guardians; they would be hateful masters instead of allies of the citizens; and so “hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of the enemies within than the enemies without, they would drag themselves and the rest of the state to speedy destruction.” It remains to take a glance at the manhood and later life of the Guardians. As young men, the Guardians belong to the auxiliaries; and since they are not permitted to perform any of the manual arts--for skill in any of the trades tended to make a man warped and one-sided, like the symbolic blacksmith god, Hephæstos--their physical edge was maintained by the unceasing discipline of the gymnasium and “military” expeditions. I put military in quotation marks, because a greater part of the warriors’ time is spent not in war but in preparation for war; and it is plain that Plato looked upon war as an unnecessary evil, for it arose out of the unjust state; and therefore he must have resorted to warlike discipline for the educational values he found in it. From thirty-five to fifty the potential Guardians undertake practical activities, commanding armies and gaining experience of life. After fifty, those who are qualified devote themselves to philosophy: out of their experience and their inner reflection they figure the essential nature of the good community; and on occasion each guardian abandons divine philosophy for a while, takes his turn at the helm of the state, and trains his successors. 10 What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman differ from Julius Cæsar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt?