92 How to place the capable in power 



Hippodamus placed them, with the farmers, in nominal citizenship but 

 de facto bondage. Plato tolerates them because he cannot do without 

 them. In the matter of hard bodily labour, free or slave, the position 

 of Plato is clear. He would devolve it upon slaves; in agriculture, with 

 a coexisting alternative system of serf-tenants. But both classes are to 

 be Barbarians. It seems that Hippodamus meant the public, if not the 

 private, land of his model state to be worked by slaves. Most striking 

 is the fact that Plato in his later years combined the aim of self- 

 sufficiency with dependence on servile labour. Commerce is, for the 

 moral health of the state, to be strictly limited. The supply of necessary 

 food-stuffs is to be a domestic industry, carried on by alien serfs or slaves 

 for the most part. Such communism as exists among the Guardians 

 in the Republic is a communism of consumers who take no part in 

 material production: and it is abandoned in the Laws. 



The above outlines must suffice as a sketch of the situation both in 

 practice and in theory when Aristotle took the matter in hand. The 

 working defects of Greek constitutions were obvious to many, and the 

 incapacity of the ignorant masses in democracies was especially evident 

 to thoughtful but irresponsible critics. Yet the selfishness of the rich 

 in oligarchies was not ignored, and the instability of governments 

 supported by only a minority of the citizens was an indisputable fact 

 The mass of citizens (that is, full members of the state according to 

 the qualification-rules in force) had to come in somewhere, to give 

 numerical strength to a government. How was governing capacity to 

 be placed in power under such conditions? Experience suggested that 

 things had been better for Athens when a larger part of her citizens 

 lived on the land. Use could no doubt be made of this experience in 

 case an opening for increasing the number of peasant farmers 1 should 

 occur. But it was precisely in states where such a policy was most 

 needed that an opening was least likely to occur. It would seem then 

 that the only chance of improving government lay in persuading the 

 average citizen to entrust wider powers to a specially selected body of 

 competent men, in short to carry into politics the specializing principle* 

 already developed by the advance of civilization in other departments. 

 Now the average citizen was certain to test the plans of reformers by 

 considering how their operation would affect cases like his own. It 

 was therefore necessary to offer him a reassuring picture of projects of 

 this kind, if they were to receive any hearing at all. To own a plot of 

 land, inalienable and hereditary, was a security against indigence. To 

 have the labour of cultivating it performed as a matter of course by 

 others was a welcome corollary. To be relieved of mechanical drudgery 



1 See Pol VI 5 8-10, on the measures that may be taken to secure lasting etiropla.. 



2 Cfivi56, etc. 



