Well-ordered States with Self-Restraint

There may also arise questions about:

• impositions of market and harbour dues,
• the regulations of markets, police, harbours, etc.

But, heavens! Shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars?

You would compare them to those invalids who have no self-restraint. They are always:

• doctoring, increasing, and complicating their disorders, and
• imagining that they will be cured by any medicine given by anybody.

Those invalids think that their worst enemy is the one who tells them that the only remedy is to simply give up eating and drinking, wenching and idling.

Well-ordered States forbid, with death, the altering of their constitution. Yet he who sweetly courts people into this liberal system is skillful in anticipating and gratifying their desires. He is even held to be a good statesman. But those States are really as bad as those invalids.

Do you not admire the coolness and dexterity of these ready ministers of political corruption?

But not of all of them. There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into thinking that they are really statesmen. These are not to be admired.

When a man declares himself to be four cubits high and many others cannot measure it, he cannot believe them.

So do not be angry with them. They are not as good as a play.

They try to begin paltry reforms. They imagine that they can end frauds in contracts by legislation. They do not know that they are merely cutting off the heads of a hydra.

The true legislator will not trouble himself with this class of laws. Such laws are useless in an ill-ordered state.

A well-ordered state can make the correct laws, flowing from previous regulations.

The religious and spiritual laws remain:

• the institution of temples and sacrifices,
• the entire service of gods, demigods, and heroes,
• the ordering of the repositories of the dead, and
• the rites for propitiating the inhabitants of the world below.

These are matters that we ourselves are ignorant of. As founders of a city, we should entrust them to our ancestral deity and not to any interpreter. He is the god who sits in the centre and is the interpreter of religion to all. Amid all this, where is justice?

Now that our city has been made habitable:

• light a candle and search,
• get your brother, Polemarchus, and the rest of our friends to help.

Let us see where in it we can discover justice and injustice, how they differ from one another, and which of them man would be with.