arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,
who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service,
and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a
bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into
poor and helpless estate.

Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,
and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up
has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul,
encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on
justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out
of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature
is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of
soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own
esteem.

One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done by
slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in
work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such
plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
such as that of the United States.