glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism--the
immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed
part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day
bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run
not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the _accoucheur,_ of
the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and
breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the
function of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say,
are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know how
Sparta--the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her--answered them.
Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-being
of the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fell
under the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of his
parents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but a
commission of the Phyle in which he was born decided the question. If
he was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on a
place called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of this
that never did the sun in his course light on man half so godly
stalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout old
Sparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and for
all, they were resolved to have done with. The word which they used to
express the idea "ugly," meant also "hateful," "vile," "disgraceful"
--and I need hardly point out to you the significance of that
fact alone; for they considered--and rightly--that there is no
sort of natural reason why every denizen of earth should not be
perfectly hale, integral, sane, beautiful--if only very moderate pains
be taken to procure this divine result. One fellow, indeed, called
Nancleidas, grew a little too fat to please the sensitive eyes of the
Spartans: I believe he was periodically whipped. Under a system so very
barbarous, the super-sweet, egoistic voice of the club-footed poet