AND ON ONE OF MR GROTE's CANONS OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM. 431 



seems to me further, that their position as a small band of privileged nobles — for 

 the proper Spartans were in fact a body of nobles, with exclusive privileges, as set 

 against the great mass of the population — this difficult and slippery position, I say, 

 rendered it in the highest degree perilous that any divisions should arise within 

 the principal body ; and such dissensions would naturally arise in those days, and 

 in a country where landed property was the only valuable property, if the small 

 section of the country originally occupied by the invaders had been absorbed by 

 a few of the more powerful families, while the great mass was left with small 

 allotments, which, by the action of well-known social laws, would have a tendency 

 constantly to diminish. It is to dissensions of this kind, I conceive, that both 

 Plutakch (chap. 2) and Isocrates (p. 270) allude, when they talk of the period 

 of disorder and confusion which prevailed in Sparta before the final settlement of 

 the constitution by Lycurgus ; and we may justly conceive the mission of that 

 legislator to have consisted in adjusting this matter by an Agrarian law, as 

 Solon effected a similar compromise between the claims of debtor and creditor 

 two hundred years later in Athens, or as Baron Stein, after the battle of Jena 

 (in 1808), under the pressure of a great national calamity, deprived the Prussian 

 nobility of a great part of their landed property, and created a race of independent 

 peasants from the appropriation. Of course, I do not mean to say to what ex- 

 tent the principle of absolute equality in the possession of the national acres 

 might have been systematically carried out by the great Lacedaemonian lawgiver. 

 Of that we can know nothing. All we can say is, that in accordance with the 

 general spirit of ancient citizenship, and as a measure absolutely necessary for 

 the security of a small body of nobles so situated, he would insist that every citizen, 

 qua citizen, should have his sufficient allotment ; and as in those early times, 

 before the conquest of Messene, the amount of really valuable land in Lacedsemon 

 was not large, it seems impossible that any very large properties could have 

 been allotted ; and thus the very necessity of the case would dictate a practical 

 equality, which historians, writing in times of monstrously accumulated wealth, 

 might easily work up into a sort of mathematical marvel, to a British critical 

 intellect in the nineteenth century after Christ altogether incredible. 



These are the views to which, after much consideration, I have arrived on this 

 interesting subject ; and I feel a strong conviction that they are the views, which 

 with the sound practical intellect of the British people, constitutionally averse to all 

 conjectural novelties, however brilliant, will ultimately prevail. In the meantime, 

 I shall not be surprised if the authority of Mr Grote's name in matters where he 

 is a safe guide, shall lead the majority astray for a season in matters where he is 

 most unreliable. Generally, with regard to his whole method of estimating the 

 contents of early historical tradition, I consider him to be unsound. As concerns 

 the special matter of the Agrarian laws, I shall conclude here by protesting 

 against the new canon of historical criticism, which he enunciates formally while 



