the virtue of the soul as a whole;
of each part never failing to perform its own function and that alone.
To ask, now, whether justice or injustice is the more profitable becomes
ridiculous.

Now we shall find that virtue is one, but that vice has several forms;
as there is but one form of perfect state--ours--whether it happens to
be called a monarchy if there be but one guardian, or an aristocracy if
there be more; and, as it has four principal imperfect forms, so there
are four main vices.

Here Glaucon and Adeimantus refused to let me go on; I had shirked a
serious difficulty. What about women and children? My saying that the
soldiers were to live in common might mean anything. What kind of
communism was I demanding? Well, there are two different questions: What
is desirable? And, What is possible? First, then, our defenders are our
watch-dogs. Glaucon knows all about dogs; we don't differentiate in the
case of males and females; the latter hunt with the pack. If women are
similarly to have the same employments as men, they must have the same
education in music and gymnastic. We must not mind ribald comments. But
should they share masculine employments? Do they differ from men in such
a way that they should not? Women bear children, and men beget them; but
apart from that the differences are really only in degrees of capacity,
not essential distinctions of quality; even as men differ among
themselves. The natures being the same, the education must be the same,
and the same careers must be open.

But a second and more alarming wave threatens us: Community of wives and
children. "You must prove both the possibility and desirability of
that." Men and women must be trained together and live together, but not
in licentiousness. They must be mated with the utmost care for
procreation, the best being paired at due seasons, nominally by lot, and
for the occasion. The offspring of the selected will have a common
nursery; the mothers will not know which were their own children.
Parentage will be permissible only between twenty-five and fifty-five,
and between twenty and forty. The children begotten in the same batch of
espousals will be brothers and sisters.

The absence of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it
abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state
removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians
will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is s