[151] Some legislators have introduced the system of filling magistracies by lot, to the detriment of their peoples, for the lot shows good luck, not merit. In fact the lot often falls to many of the unworthy whom a good man, if he obtained command, would reject as unfit to be classed even among his subjects.
[152] For those “minor rulers,” as some phrase it, whom we call “masters” do not retain in their service all they might whether home-bred or purchased, but only those who prove amenable: the incorrigible they sometimes sell in a mass as unworthy to be slaves of men of merit.
[153] And can it then be right to make masters and rulers of whole cities and nations out of persons chosen by lot, by what we may call a blunder of fortune, the uncertain and unstable? In the matter of tending the sick lot has no place, for physicians do not gain their posts by lot, but are approved by the test of experience.
[154] And to secure a successful voyage and the safety of travellers on the sea we do not choose by lot and send straight away to the helm a steersman who through his ignorance will produce in fine weather and calm water shipwrecks in which Nature has no part. Instead we send one whom we know to have been carefully trained from his earliest years in the art of steersmanship. Such a one will have made many a voyage, crossed all or most seas, carefully studied the trading ports, harbours and anchorages and roadsteads, both in the islands and the mainland, and know the sea routes as well as, if not better than, the roads on land, through accurately watching the heavenly bodies.
[155] For by observing the courses of the stars and following their ordered movements he has been able to open up in the pathless waste high-roads where none can err, with this incredible result, that the creature whose element is land can float his way through the element of water.
[156] And shall one who is to have in his hands great and populous cities with all their inhabitants, and the constitutions of the cities and the management of matters private, public and sacred, a task which we might well call an art of arts and a science of sciences, be the sport of the unstable oscillation of the lot and escape the strict test of truth, which can only be tested by proofs founded on reason?