Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/781

Rh of domestic life, the forbidding of industry or any money-seeking occupation, the interdict of going abroad without leave, and the authorized censorship under which his days and nights were passed. There was fully carried out in Sparta the Greek theory of society, that "the citizen belongs neither to himself nor to his family, but to his city." So that though in this exceptional case chronic militancy was prevented from developing a supreme head, owning the individual citizen in body and estate, yet it developed an essentially identical relation between the community as a whole and its units. The community, exercising its power through a compound head instead of through a simple head, completely enslaved the individual. While the lives and labors of the Helots were devoted exclusively to the support of those who formed the militant organization, the lives and labors of those who formed the militant organization were exclusively devoted to the service of the state—they were slaves with a difference.

Of modern illustrations that furnished by Russia will suffice. Here, again, with the wars which effected conquests and consolidations, came the development of the victorious commander into the absolute ruler, who, if not divine by alleged origin, yet acquired something like divine prestige. "All men are equal before God, and the Russian's God is the Emperor," says De Custine; "the supreme governor is so raised above earth that he sees no difference between the serf and the lord." Under the stress of Peter the Great's wars, which, as the nobles complained, took them away from their homes, "not, as formerly, for a single campaign, but for long years," they became "the servants of the state, without privileges, without dignity, subjected to corporal punishment, and burdened with onerous duties from which there was no escape. . . . Any noble who refused to serve ('the state in the army, the fleet, or the civil administration, from boyhood to old age') was not only deprived of his estate, as in the old times, but was declared to be a traitor, and might be condemned to capital punishment." "Under Peter," says Wallace, "all offices, civil and military," were "arranged in fourteen classes or ranks"; and he "defined the obligations of each with microscopic minuteness. After his death the work was carried on in the same spirit, and the tendency reached its climax in the reign of Nicholas." In the words of De Custine, "the tchinn [the name for this organization] is a nation formed into a regiment; it is the military system applied to all classes of society, even to those who never go to war." With this universal regimentation in structure went a regimental discipline. The conduct of life was dictated to the citizens at large in the same way as to soldiers. In the reign of Peter and his successors domestic entertainments were appointed and regulated; the people were compelled to change their costumes; the clergy to cut off their beards; and even the harnessing of horses was according to pattern. Occupations were controlled to the extent that "no boyard could enter any profession, or forsake it