t, and practising hospitality; moreover, as you
were saying just now, they have gold and silver, and all that is usual
among the favourites of fortune; but our poor citizens are no better
than mercenaries who are quartered in the city and are always mounting
guard?

Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in
addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if
they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on
a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is
thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature
might be added.

But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.

You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?

Yes.

If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall
find the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our
guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in
founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one
class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a
State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should
be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice:
and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the
happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not
piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a
whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of
State. Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to
us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most
beautiful parts of the body--the eyes ought to be purple, but you have
made them black--to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not
surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no
longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other
features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful. And so I
say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of
happiness which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can
clothe our husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their
heads, and bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more.
Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by
the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is
conveniently at hand, and working at p