which is not governed according to the principles of justice; and we ought just as readily to understand how the soul of an individual man must go equally to ruin when his disposition is not regulated and his conduct guided by the principles of justice. At the outset of the inquiry, Plato had found himself beset with difficulties when he attempted to explain justice as it appears in the individual man; but by looking at it as manifested on a great scale in the organisation of the state, and then by holding that man is but a miniature of society, he is enabled to clear away the obstacles which had obstructed his course, and to carry through his argument in a very masterly and convincing fashion.
40. To explain, then, the nature of individual virtue, individual justice, Plato asks what is political virtue, political justice. Find out this, and then you will know what justice is, considered as the virtue of the soul. Understand the virtue of the state as shown in the true constitution of the state, and then you will understand the virtue of the soul as shown in the true constitution of the soul. Now, political justice, the virtue of the state, distributes to every member of the community his proper province of action, and seeks to prevent one citizen from encroaching upon another. That is the business of the state, and when it is rightly executed a true system or organisation of society is the result. There are three orders in the state. First, the working order,
