SPARTAN EUGENICS 293 



pations. Family life scarcely existed among the Spartans. 

 The men lived together in a sort of camp or club, very fru- 

 gally, and ready for instant warfare. Marriage was recog- 

 nized as an institution for the production of soldiers merely. 

 The child belonged to the state, rather than to its parents. 

 The magistrates decided whether it should be reared or not. 

 Plutarch says concerning Lycurgus, founder of the Spartan 

 constitution: — "Lycurgus was of a persuasion that children 

 were not so much the property of their parents as of the 

 whole commonwealth, and therefore, would not have his 

 citizens begot by the first-comers, but by the best men that 

 could be found ; the laws of other nations seemed to him very 

 absurd and inconsistent, where people would be so solicitous 

 for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and pay money 

 to procure fine breeding, and yet kept their wives shut up, 

 to be made mothers only by themselves, who might be fool- 

 ish, infirm, or diseased; as if it were not apparent that chil- 

 dren of a bad breed would prove their bad qualities first 

 upon those who kept and were rearing them, and well-born 

 children, in like manner, their good qualities." 



The Spartan system of eugenics seems to have attained 

 its object, the production of superior children, but we must 

 remember that with it was combined a system of life-long 

 physical education and military discipline which has rarely 

 if ever been equalled, so that it is impossible to say how 

 much of the result obtained was due to breeding and how 

 much to training of the youth. 



Further the Spartan system succeeded only so long as 

 Sparta was a small, isolated community, without wealth, 

 luxury, or leisure, and using iron for money. Foreign con- 

 quest was the undoing of Sparta. She could conquer in a 

 fight but she could not govern except as she governed her 

 Helots — by enslaving them. Upon contact with the rest of 

 the world, life was found to have other attractions than 

 fighting, and the old discipline was relaxed. 



Moreover, what the Spartan system produced was a single 

 type of man, the soldier. The memory of Athens is sacred for 



