Plato's Commonwealth

Extract

A country so situated that its growth depends on sea-power and foreign trade heads an alliance against an emperor bent on adding a good part of Europe to his dominions. The emperor is defeated; and in an ample stretch of comparatively quiet years the champion of freedom finds opportunity to take the lead among its neighbours in the arts of peace. At home, democratic institutions are developed towards their logical completion; abroad, ambition is satisfied by consolidating an empire overseas. A golden age of prosperity and progress—or so it will seem when men look back upon it from the darker days that are to come. For an expanding prosperity has to reckon with the jealousy of commercial rivals; and an expanding empire is not always welcomed as a boon by the countries it penetrates and absorbs. There is a growing tension. A continental power, whose citizens are trained to the highest pitch of military efficiency, declares war. The States are grouped in two alliances, neither of which is strong enough to overpower the other or to inflict a fatal wound. No soldier of genius appears on either side, and the war drags on in a series of futile successes and futile defeats. The strain of anxiety and the release of those ugliest passions which, in time of war, assume the name of virtue, demoralize the combatants. The tacit conventions that lie at the base of civilized life are called in question or openly denied. Men lose faith in democracy, and even in freedom; they come near to losing faith in life itself. Somewhere at the heart of their being a nerve snaps; and when the war of exhaustion comes to a disastrous close, they are left disheartened and listless, unable to believe in a future worth the effort they lack the driving power to make.