This happy unity (ὁμόνοια), or harmony (ξυμφωνία), of all classes is to Plato the highest goal toward which the true statesman should strive,278 and the point of next highest importance to the communism of the guards is the proper regulation of wealth and poverty for the artisans.279
The mere fact that he does not believe the artisans to be capable of political independence by no means indicates that he is indifferent to their social or economic welfare. It is to conserve this that he would put the government into the hands of the most capable,280 and, in any event, the artisans are not to be held in subjection so much by external force as by their own free self-restraint.281
This, in itself, is sufficient evidence that Plato intended to include the third class in his lower scheme of education, a fact borne out also by other passages.282
It must be admitted that a somewhat different spirit pervades the Laws, where he seems to have despaired of the lofty ideal of the Republic. He relegates the working classes to non-citizenship.
But here, also, he is still anxious that they shall have the sort of education that befits their station,283 and that justice be done them.284
He also provides against the existence of beggary in the state.285
Whatever may be said of his aristocratic spirit, therefore, he cannot be justly accused of the gross indifference of the early nineteenth-century economy and of modern capitalism toward either masses or public, in their concern for material wealth.286
# COMMUNISTIC AND SOCIALISTIC IDEAS
The Greek theory of distribution was employed chiefly in the criticism of the institution of private property, and in the suggestion of more or less