you not think we should want schoolmasters, tutors, nurses, hair-dressers, barbers, manufacturers and cooks? Should we not want pig-drivers, which were not wanted in our more modest city, in this one, and a multitude of others to administer to other animals, which would then become necessary articles of food,—or should we not?—Certainly we should.—Should we not want physicians much more, living in this manner than before? The same tract of country would no longer provide sustenance for the state. Must we then not usurp from the territory of our neighbours, and then we should make aggressions, and so we have discovered the origin of war; which is the principal cause of the greatest public and private calamities.—C. xi.
IV. And first, we must improve upon the composers
of fabulous histories in verse, to compose them according
to the rules of moral beauty; and those not composed
according to the rules must be rejected; and we
must persuade mothers and nurses to teach those which
we approve to their children, and to form their minds
by moral fables, far more than their bodies by their
hands.—Lib. ii.
V. ON THE DANGER OF THE STUDY OF ALLEGORICAL COMPOSITION (IN A LARGE SENSE) FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.
For a young person is not competent to judge what
portions of a fabulous composition are allegorical and
what literal; but the opinions produced by a literal
acceptation of that which has no meaning, or a bad
one, except in an allegorical sense, are often irradicable.—Lib
ii.
VI.—God then, since he is good, cannot be, as is
vulgarly supposed, the cause of all things; he is the
