is your business, Guardians, to keep intact this purity of breed. No child of gold must remain among the artisans; no child of iron among the rulers: for the State shall surely perish (so saith an oracle) when ruled by brass or iron." And this story must be handed down from father to son, as a sacred form of faith in our State.
Now our Guardians must have neither houses, nor lands, nor dwellings, nor storehouses of their own; but only fixed pay, and a soldier's lodging, and a common mess-table.
Adeimantus objects that the life of the Guardians can scarcely be happy on these terms—with no money to spend on themselves or their friends, kept on "board-wages," and always on duty.
It is not our business (answers Socrates) to insure the happiness of a class. But our Guardians will be happy—that is, if they do their duty, preserve the unity of the State, maintain the golden mean between wealth and poverty, and be ever on the watch against the spirit of innovation—dangerous even in music, doubly so in education—and leave the highest and most sacred legislation to our ancestral god of Delphi.
But (he interrupts himself suddenly) we are forgetting Justice all this time. We must light a candle and search our city diligently, now that we have founded one, till we find it. Clearly our State, if it be perfect, will contain the four cardinal virtues; and, if we can first discover three out of the four, the unknown remainder must be Justice.
Wisdom will be the science of protection, possessed
