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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: in the assembly, and the matter in hand relates to building, the builders
are summoned as advisers; when the question is one of ship-building, then
the ship-wrights; and the like of other arts which they think capable of
being taught and learned. And if some person offers to give them advice
who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be
good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh
and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself;
or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the
command of the prytanes. This is their way of behaving about professors of
the arts. But when the question is an affair of state, then everybody is
free to have a say--carpenter, tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and
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