Sparta ever admired but never imitated.
§ 50. I have already mentioned the remarkable fact that though, at every period of this history, Spartan manners and Spartan laws commanded the respect and the admiration of all Greece, though the Spartan constitution had proved stable when all else was in constant flux and change, still no practical attempt was ever made in older Greek history to imitate this famous constitution. It shows, no doubt, in the old Greek legislators, a far keener sense of what was practical or possible that, instead of foisting upon every new or newly emancipated State the ordinances which had succeeded elsewhere as a legitimate, slow, and historic growth, they rather sought to adapt their reforms to the conditions of each State as they found it. They fully appreciated the difference between the normal and the exceptional in legislation.
Practical legislation wiser in Greece than in modern Europe.
The politicians of modern Europe, who are repeating gaily, and without any sense of its absurdity, the experiment of handing over the British parliamentary system to half-civilized and hardly emancipated populations, and who cry
injustice and shame upon those who decline to follow their advice—these unhistorical and illogical statesmen might well take lessons from the sobriety of Greek politicians, if their own common-sense fails to tell them that the forest-tree of centuries cannot be transplanted; nay, even the sapling will not thrive in ungrateful soil.
Sparta a model for the theorists.
A small State preferred.
But although the real rulers of men in Greece saw all this clearly, it was not so with the theorists, nor indeed were they bound to observe practical limitations in framing the highest ideal to which man could attain. Hence we see in almost all the theorists a strong tendency to make Spartan institutions the proper type of a perfect State. Plato will not even consider the duties of an imperial or dominating State, he rather regards large territory and vast population as an insuperable obstacle to good government. But as a philosopher deeply interested in the real culture of the mind, perhaps as a theorist deeply impressed with the haphazard character of the traditional education, he felt that to intrust an uneducated mob with the control of public affairs was either to hand over the State to unscrupulous leaders, who would gain the favour of the crowd by false and unworthy means, or to run the chance of having the most important matters settled by the caprice of a many-headed and therefore wholly irresponsible tyrant.
Plato's successors.
Their general agreement,