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15“For I would not have you think that I am advising you to enslave the people and the senate and then set up a tyranny. This is a thing I should never dare suggest to you nor would you bring yourself to do it. The other course, however, would be honourable and expedient both for you and for the city—that you should yourself, in consultation with the best men, enact all the appropriate laws, without the possibility of any opposition or remonstrance to these laws on the part of any one from the masses; 2that you and your counsellors should conduct the wars according to your own wishes, all other citizens rendering instant obedience to your commands; that the choice of the officials should rest with you and your advisers; and that you and they should also determine the honours and the punishments. The advantage of all this would be that whatever pleased you in consultation with your peers would immediately become law; 3that our wars against our enemies would be waged with secrecy and at the opportune time; that those to whom any task was entrusted would be appointed because of their merit and not as the result of the lot or rivalry for office; that the good would be honoured without arousing jealousy and the bad punished without causing rebellion. 4Thus whatever business was done would be most likely to be managed in the right way, instead of being referred to the popular assembly, or deliberated upon openly, or entrusted to partisan delegates, or exposed to the danger of ambitious rivalry; and we should be happy in the enjoyment of the blessings which are vouchsafed to us, instead of being embroiled in hazardous wars abroad or in unholy civil strife. 5For these are the evils found in every democracy,—the more powerful men, namely, in reaching out after the primacy and hiring the weaker, turn everything upside down,—but they have been most frequent in our country, and there is no other way to put a stop to them than the way I propose. 6And the evidence is, that we have now for a long time been engaged in wars and civil strife. The cause is the multitude of our population and the magnitude of the business of our government; for the population embraces men of every kind, in respect both to race and to endowment, and both their tempers and their desires are manifold; and the business of the state has become so vast that it can be administered only with the greatest difficulty.
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