He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful institutions to beautiful ideas. This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the members of the “upper class.” Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance. For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.