276 SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES 



breaking the covenants and agreements you have made 

 with us, and wronging those whom you ought least to 

 wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, 

 and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and 

 our brethren the laws in the world below will receive you 

 as an enemy ; for they will know that you have done your 

 best to destroy us. Listen to us then and not to Crito.' 



1 ' This is the voice which I seemed to hear murmuring 

 in my ears like the sound of the flute in the ears of the 

 mystic ; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears and 

 prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that 

 anything more which you may say will be vain. Yet 

 speak if you have anything to say." 



Crito. " I have nothing to say, Socrates." 



Soc. "Leave me then to follow whithersoever God leads." 



1 ' Thejvery existence of the State," says Plato elsewhere, 

 "jmplies that virtue is not any man's private posses- 

 sion. . . . All of us have a mutual interest in thejustice 

 and virtue of one another. . . . He who appears to you 

 to be the worst of those who have been brought up in 

 laws and humanities would appear to be a just man and 

 a master of justice if he were to be compared with men 

 who had no education, or courts of justice or laws, or any 

 restraints upon them which compelled them to practise 

 virtue." 



I do not deny that there is more of State compulsion 

 inthis passage from theCW/o than is pleasing to modern 

 gars, or is consistent with the welfare of the State itself, 

 not to speak of that of the individual. Plato did not 

 recognize, as fully as later thinkers have done, that the 

 State in pouring its treasures into its citizens makes them 

 free. Nevertheless, the dependence of the individual upon. 



