Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/780

760 the first contained more than a score of different orders; the second some half-dozen beyond those constituted by military grades; the third nearly a dozen; and the fourth a still greater number. Though within the ruling classes the castes were not so rigorously defined as to prevent change of function in successive generations, yet Herodotus and Diodorus state that industrial occupations descended from father to son; "every particular trade, and manufacture was carried on by its own craftsmen, and none changed from one trade to another." How elaborate was the regimentation may be judged from the detailed account of the staff of officers and workers engaged in one of their vast quarries: the numbers and kinds of functionaries paralleling those of an army. To support this highly-developed regulative organization, civil, military, and sacerdotal—an organization which held exclusive possession of the land—the lower classes labored. "Overseers were set over the wretched people, who were urged to hard work more by the punishment of the stick than words of warning." And whether or not official oversight included domiciliary visits, it at any rate went to the extent of taking note of each family. "Every man was required under pain of death to give an account to the magistrate of how he earned his livelihood."

Take now another ancient society, which, contrasted in sundry respects, shows us, along with habitual militancy, the assumption of structural traits allied in their fundamental characters to those thus far observed. I refer to Sparta. That warfare did not among the Spartans evolve a simple despotic head, while in part due to causes which, as before shown, favor the development of compound political heads, was largely due to the accident of their double kingship: the presence of two divinely-descended chiefs prevented the concentration of power. But though from this cause there continued an imperfectly centralized government, the relation of this government to members of the community was substantially like that of militant governments in general. Notwithstanding the serfdom, and in towns the slavery of the Helots, and notwithstanding the political subordination of the Perioiki, they all, in common with the Spartans proper, were under obligation to military service: the working function of the first, and the trading function, so far as it existed, which was carried on by the second, were subordinate to the militant function with which the third was exclusively occupied. And the civil divisions thus marked reappeared in the military divisions: "At the battle of Platæa every Spartan hoplite had seven Helots, and every Periœki hoplite one Helot to attend him." The extent to which, by the daily military discipline, prescribed military mess, and fixed contributions of food, the individual life of the Spartan was subordinated to the public demands from seven years upward, needs mention only to show the rigidity of the restraints which here, as elsewhere, the militant type imposes—restraints which were further shown in the prescribed age for marriage, the prevention