All domestic sanctities were rudely invaded, and even
the infant's privilege to live depended upon its martial promise; the
aspirations of religion were levelled down into sympathy with the most
brutal enthusiasm, as afterwards happened in the case of Rome; the very
idea of Beauty was demolished, and with it all that was sacred in human
nature, and all hope of progress. The whole State was sacred to the idea
of Military Despotism.
Thus it happened that Sparta, from her first introduction in history to
her exit, was at a stand-still in whatever involved anything higher than
brute force. In this respect she differed from Athens as much as the
South at this day differs from the North, and from precisely the same
causes, the principal of which, in each case, was barbarism,--barbarism
deliberately organized, and maintained in conscious preference to
intellectual refinement.
And yet it is remarkable that both Lacedaemon and the South, as compared
with their respective rivals, started in life at an immense advantage,
and seemingly with a far more auspicious prospect before them. The early
Virginian turned up his nose at Plymouth as a very despicable affair,
and wondered that the Puritans did not set sail _en masse_ for the
Bahamas. Gorgeous were the descriptions of Virginia sent home by some of
the first settlers, in which lions and tigers, and a whole menagerie
of tropical animals, came in for no small share of wonder; and, as an
offset to this summer luxuriance of life, most disparaging pictures were
drawn of the bleak sterility of New England,--and even that which was
the only compensation for this barrenness of the earth, namely, the
abundance of fish in the sea, was, as respects the revenue derived from
it, made an especial subject of derision.
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