The first stage in this "decline and fall" will be a Timocracy, marked by a spirit of ambition and love of gain; in which the art of war will preponderate, and our Guardians will think lightly of philosophy and much of political power.
Then comes an Oligarchy, where gold is all-powerful and virtue is depreciated; and the State becomes divided into two hostile classes—one enormously rich, the other miserably poor; and in it paupers and criminals multiply, and education deteriorates.
There is a change, says our theorist, in the character of the individual citizen corresponding to each of these changes in the form of government; but it must be confessed that the minute analysis of the causes of this change, and the result of certain characteristics in each parent, would strike a modern reader as something more than fanciful.
The intemperate desire of riches, and the licence and extravagance thus encouraged, do their own work in the State, until you find everywhere grasping misers and ruined spendthrifts. Meanwhile the lower orders grow turbulent and conscious of their power. Their insubordination soon brings matters to a crisis: there is a revolution, and a Democracy is the result. This may be defined as "a pleasant and lawless and motley constitution, giving equal rights to unequal persons;" and it is pervaded by a marvellous freedom in speech and action, and a strange diversity of character. Each man does what he likes in his own eyes, with a magnanimous disregard of the law: he obeys or disobeys at his own pleasure; and if some criminal be sentences
