We look in vain for consistency either in men or things.

But we have seen enough of improvement in our own time to justify us in the belief that the world is worth working for and that a good man's life is not thrown away.

Such reflections may help us to bring home to ourselves by inward sympathy the language of Plato in the Laws, and to combine into something like a whole his various and at first sight inconsistent utterances.
VI.

The Republic may be described as the Spartan constitution appended to a government of philosophers.

But in the Laws an Athenian element is also introduced.