brooding over their own perfections), such will be the life of the Ideal State!
This announcement of the highest end to be aimed at by Politics is as if some modern writer, in treating of the State, should seek to identify it with the Invisible Church of God. Or, again, it may remind us of the saying that the supreme and ultimate product of civilisation is “two or three gentlemen talking together in a room.” This paradox is true and quite Aristotelian: mental activities are the highest things of all; enactments, and police, and wars, and treaties exist for the sake of order, of which the best fruit is the mutual play of intelligence and the glow of friendship. But one peculiarity of Aristotle’s ideal politics is the comparative smallness of their scale. Like a true Greek, he does not think of nations and empires, but of city-states. It has been said that the city-state was something like the University of modern times. Aristotle regarded it as an organism of limited size, in which every citizen should have his function, and in which every one should be personally known to the rulers. He said (‘Eth.’ IX. x. iii.) that 100,000 citizens would be far too many to constitute a state. Some of the peculiarities of his Ideal State may be specified as follows:— Every full citizen was to be a landowner, with slaves to cultivate his soil, but no great accumulation of property in any one man’s hands was to be allowed. The citizens were to constitute a warrior caste, and were each to be admitted in turn, when of mature age, to a share in the government. No artisan or tradesman was to be a citizen; the city
