been easily enforced, for there is no difficulty in maintaining the
poor when the population is small. In our own times the difficulty of
pauperism is rendered far greater, (1) by the enormous numbers, (2) by
the facility of locomotion, (3) by the increasing tenderness for human
life and suffering. And the only way of meeting the difficulty seems
to be by modern nations subdividing themselves into small bodies having
local knowledge and acting together in the spirit of ancient communities
(compare Arist. Pol.)

V. Regarded as the framework of a polity the Laws are deemed by Plato to
be a decline from the Republic, which is the dream of his earlier years.
He nowhere imagines that he has reached a higher point of speculation.
He is only descending to the level of human things, and he often returns
to his original idea. For the guardians of the Republic, who were
the elder citizens, and were all supposed to be philosophers, is now
substituted a special body, who are to review and amend the laws,
preserving the spirit of the legislator. These are the Nocturnal
Council, who, although they are not specially trained in dialectic,
are not wholly destitute of it; for they must know the relation of
particular virtues to the general principle of virtue. Plato has been
arguing throughout the Laws that temperance is higher than courage,
peace than war, that the love of both must enter into the character of
the good citizen. And at the end the same thought is summed up by him in
an abstract form. The true artist or guardian must be able to reduce the
many to the one, than which, as he says with an enthusiasm worthy of the
Phaedrus or Philebus, 'no more philosophical method was ever devised
by the wit of man.' But the sense of unity in difference can only be
acquired by study; and Plato does not explain to us the nature of this
study, which we may reasonably infer, though there is a remarkable
omission of the word, to be akin to the dialectic of the Republic.

The Nocturnal Council is to consist of the priests who have obtained the
rewards of virtue, of the ten eldest guardians of the law, and of the
director and ex-directors of education; each of whom is to select for
approval a younger coadjutor. To this council the 'Spectator,' who is
sent to visit foreign countries, has to make his report. It is not
an administrative body, but an assembly of sages who are to make
legislation their study. Plato is not altogether disinclined to ch