and most accomplished of wizards, who
must at any cost be separated from the true king or Statesman, if we are
ever to see daylight in the present enquiry.

YOUNG SOCRATES: That is a hope not lightly to be renounced.

STRANGER: Never, if I can help it; and, first, let me ask you a
question.

YOUNG SOCRATES: What?

STRANGER: Is not monarchy a recognized form of government?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes.

STRANGER: And, after monarchy, next in order comes the government of the
few?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Of course.

STRANGER: Is not the third form of government the rule of the multitude,
which is called by the name of democracy?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly.

STRANGER: And do not these three expand in a manner into five, producing
out of themselves two other names?

YOUNG SOCRATES: What are they?

YOUNG SOCRATES: What are they?

STRANGER: There is a criterion of voluntary and involuntary, poverty and
riches, law and the absence of law, which men now-a-days apply to them;
the two first they subdivide accordingly, and ascribe to monarchy two
forms and two corresponding names, royalty and tyranny.

YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true.

STRANGER: And the government of the few they distinguish by the names of
aristocracy and oligarchy.

YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly.

STRANGER: Democracy alone, whether rigidly observing the laws or not,
and whether the multitude rule over the men of property with their
consent or against their consent, always in ordinary language has the
same name.

YOUNG SOCRATES: True.

STRANGER: But do you suppose that any form of government which is
defined by these characteristics of the one, the few, or the many, of
poverty or wealth, of voluntary or compulsory submission, of written law
or the absence of law, can be a right one?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Why not?

STRANGER: Reflect; and follow me.

YOUNG SOCRATES: In what direction?

STRANGER: Shall we abide by what we said at first, or shall we retract
our words?

YOUNG SOCRATES: To what do you refer?

STRANGER: If I am not mistaken, we said that royal power was a science?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes.

STRANGER: And a science of a peculiar kind, which was selected out
of the rest as having a character which is at once judicial and
authoritative?

YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes.

STRANGER: And there was one kind of authority over lifeless things and
another other living animals; and so we proceeded in the division step
by step up to this point, not losing the idea of