“Desirous to complete the conquest of luxury and exterminate the love of riches, he introduced a third institution, which was wisely enough and ingeniously contrived.  This was the use of public tables, where all were to eat in common of the same meat, and such kinds of it as were appointed by law.  At the same time they were forbidden to eat at home, or on expensive couches and tables....  Another ordinance levelled against magnificence and expense, directed that the ceilings of houses should be wrought with no tool but the axe, and the doors with nothing but the saw.  Indeed, no man could be so absurd as to bring into a dwelling so homely and simple, bedsteads with silver feet, purple coverlets, or golden cups.”  Thus he smothered art and personal ambition, two of the most requisite essentials to a people on their onward and upward trend to civilization and success.  “A third ordinance of Lycurgus was, that they should not often make war against the same enemy, lest, by being frequently put upon defending themselves, they too should become able warriors in their turn.”

And thus he made them defenceless against their enemies.

“For the same reason he would not permit all that desired to go abroad and see other countries, lest they should contract foreign manners, gain traces of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of government.  He forbade strangers, too, to resort to Sparta who could not assign a good reason for their coming!”

Improvement with Lycurgus means retrogression with us.  He wished, perhaps ignorantly, to arrest the progress of civilization and substitute a slovenly ideal of his own.  His purpose was to cancel the civilization which the race had gained during thousands of years of effort, and bring it back to a semi-savagery.  But the world was too big for him.  It had things in view which were too great for his small, hampered mind to have any suspicion of.  No doubt he was sincere in his little, infinitesimal way; but it is a blessing for the world that his influence was confined to a very small corner of the then civilized world, and that others of broader views succeeded him to manage the affairs of states and nations.  With all deference to old Plutarch, the biographer of Lycurgus, we wish to say that however grand the laws of this man may have been as ideals, they were utter failures when brought into practice.

Of Joan of Arc

Some people say the world is getting no better, but if we take a dip into history and consider the conditions which prevailed there from the earliest times up to only a few hundred years ago, we will find a race of human beings which in no wise resemble the present output except in form and stature.  And our own forefathers—­the people of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day leading in the social world—­were not one iota better throughout those pages than many of the smallest and most unpretentious