Here is a doctrine which our modern age, that would place even education on a bread-and-butter basis, and that tends to kill initiative and vision by extreme specialization, might well consider. Even Latin literature, when taught as it too often is, merely as a syntactical grind to prepare teachers to pursue the same folly is no more one of the humanities than is industrial chemistry.622 Furthermore, Aristotle and Plato are doubtless right in their belief that a necessary extreme application to physical labor to earn the daily bread inevitably prevents mental and moral development and the proper performance of the duties of citizenship. And our modern democracies with their boasts of universal suffrage are still something of a farce, as long as economic conditions are such that the mass of the population has left no time to think of anything, except how to provide the bare physical necessities. Aristotle’s insistence upon leisure for the life of the citizen is no demand for aristocratic indolence.623 Neither is it Jowett’s “condition of a gentleman,” or merely the idealized notion of an “internal state” in which “the intellect, free from the cares of practical life, energizes or reposes in the consciousness of truth.” It is rather a demand for release from material cares, so as to insure the highest degree of activity in self-development and political service.624
It may well be observed too, that Aristotle, the special champion of slavery, and reputed scorner of physical labor for freemen, exhibits a real interest in industry, in unguarded moments. One of his arguments against communism is that it would take from the citizen the desire to work.625 He repudiates the life of indolence, and finds happiness in action.626 He considers a practical knowledge of agriculture as essential to the successful economist,627 and defines the just as those who live upon their