ABSTRACT
Turning from the justice which is the life-breath of the State to the means by which it is to be realized, we find two great institutions suggested by Plato. One is a system of common education by the State; the other is a social order of communism. A system of common education will give that training for a special work, and that instinct for keeping unselfishly to its performance, which justice demands. By a social order of communism, time will be gained for such training (since that order will liberate men from the necessity of acquiring a livelihood); temptations to selfishness will be removed; and, above all, the view of the individual as part of a whole, which is implied in the Platonic conception of justice, will find its fulfilment. Of the two, the new education is greater than the new social order. 1 It is an attempt to touch the evil at its source, and to reform wrong ways of living by altering the whole outlook on life. It is an attempt to cure a mental malady by mental medicine. In this sense Rousseau was right; and the Republic is pre-eminently ‘the finest treatise on education that ever was written’. The new social order is by comparison secondary. It is caution’s excess: if spiritual means are not enough, men must draw on material reinforcements. As it is secondary, so also, at any rate in comparison with the positive quality of a system of education, communism is something negative. Education means the bringing of the soul into that environment which in each stage of its growth is best suited for its development; communism means the abstraction of those elements of environment which may divert the soul from its proper growth.
