of “false finance” which degrades individual and state alike.617 The state that produces a multitude of mechanics and but few hoplites can never be great.618
Here we have the very antithesis of the modern commercial standpoint. However, the truth is not all with the moderns, for a highly developed commerce and industry and the general prosperity of the mass of the people are not always necessarily coincident.
Moreover, it is hardly fair to interpret Aristotle too rigidly. He understood well the necessity of craftsmen and all other industrial workers to the state.619 The burden of his attack was directed against retail trade. Like Plato’s his prejudice had a moral and political root,620 and was arrayed against the extreme application to labor, and against its false purpose, rather than against labor itself. He insisted that even intellectual work, when carried to an extreme, and pursued with the wrong aim, might become equally demoralizing.621