lost; and that the very distinct evidence given by him as to the Spartan Agrarian laws, must be regarded not as his testimony merely, but as the result of the whole mass of historical evidence, including, of course, Aristotle, which he had consulted on the subject. And here we must observe, that in talking of the Spartan Agrarian laws, we are dealing with a matter, which, if it was not a mere figment, as Mr. Grote will have it, must have been as well known in ancient Greece as it is in modern Europe, that the government of the Romish church is monarchical, and that the principle of ecclesiastical democracy is represented by the Presbyterians in Scotland. Facts of this kind. are far too deep-fixed in their roots, and far too wide-spread in their branches, to be either invented or ignored. If they are invented, they will not be believed; if they are believed, it is because they cannot be ignored. To me, therefore, the testimony of two such writers as Polybius and Plutarch, expressly handling the subject, and summing up as they do the whole historical tradition of antiquity, are quite sufficient to establish the existence of Agrarian laws in ancient Sparta, although they were not supported by any other evidence. But this is far from being the case. Isocrates, in his Panathenaic oration, where a contrast is distinctly drawn between Athenian and Lacedæmonian institutions, talks expressly (270 c.) of the equality of lots in land, which characterized the Dorians when they first settled in the Peloponnesus, τῆς χώρας ἧς προσήκει ἴσον ἔχειν ἕκαστον ; and Plato, in the third book of his laws (684 d.) manifestly alludes to the same state of things. I conceive, therefore, that we have the concurrent testimony of historians, orators, and philosophers, asserting or implying the state of things in reference to the distribution of land in Sparta, which Mr. Grote, with such "irresistible force," is said to have disproved. What, then, are the authorities by which we are called on to consider that he has successfully rebutted the weight of the positive evidence just adduced? His great authority, manifestly, more narrowly looked at, in fact, his only authority, is Aristotle-a name heavy enough, perhaps, to outweigh all others, if only it shall turn out that, in the present case, his evidence has been duly sifted and justly weighed. But how stands the fact? The great philosopher's great book Пepi ПITE on "political constitutions," which, as a matter of course, contained a detailed account of Spartan laws and customs, exists, as we have already stated, no more: and we have only his work on the theory of politics, in which some points of the Spartan polity are incidentally discussed. These discussions occur principally in the Second Book; and it is here that Mr. Grote finds a notable passage (ii. 6) asserting not the equality, but the extraordinary and abnormal inequality, of property in the Spartan territory. Now, in order to understand this, we must consider carefully the whole plan and scope of the book on Politics, and interpret the Second Book with reference to that plan. The work is purely a theoretical investigation, with the view of discovering the ȧpiorn Toλrɛia, or what we call the "ideal commonwealth :" and in order to give a proper starting-point for such an investigation, the philosopher has to prove in the first place that no best republic already exists either in theory or fact that the intellectual projections of Plato and the realized work of Lycurgus are equally at fault; and therefore that the speculations of the philosopher are not foreclosed; he may safely go on reasoning out the scheme of a best polity, without being liable to the charge of actum agere. This character of the Second Book sufficiently explains its somewhat ungracious attitude, that of systematic fault-finding. He has merely to show that the various constitutions which he passes under review have, as a matter of fact, proved to be failures in certain points; and his case is made out. Accordingly, to use a vulgar phrase, he sets himself, what he does with manifest gusto as an Athenian, to pick holes in the coat of Lycurgus; and has no difficulty in finding, that the Spartan women, so often celebrated for their patriotism and their domestic virtues, are in fact the most extravagant, the most blushless, and the most domineering ladies in Greece; and that the lands, instead of being fairly divided, are accumulated in the hands of a very few proprietors (which accumulation all the ancient philosophers looked on as a great social evil), and these proprietors principally women. And in accounting for this abnormal state of things, he goes on to accuse the legislator of inconsistency, in having allowed the free disposal of landed property by testament, while he forbade it by sale inter vivos. Now this whole way of stating the matter, not only does not seem to me to deny, but rather plainly to imply, the existence of an equal division of landed property in the early days of the Spartan ascendancy. The Stagyrite speaks in this whole book of what Sparta had become in his day, not of what it was in the days of Lycurgus. He did not require to tell his readers what everybody knew, that since the days of Lysander, Sparta was no more what it had been under Lycurgus, than king Solomon of Palestine was like Joshua or Gideon. Whatever Lycurgus might have wished to make of Lacedæmon, he had not achieved it: the boasted Spartan constitution, which Plato and Xenophon had lauded, was a manifest failure: and whoever felt inclined to set up that as a model of the ȧpiorn Toλrɛia was contradicted by the strong staring fact, worth a whole waggon of arguments. The evidence of Aristotle being thus disposed of, Mr. Grote's case on the authorities, according to my judgment, completely breaks down. The other witnesses whom he cites, either say nothing at all on the point, or say something quite different from what Mr. Grote supposes. That there occurs occasional mention of rich men in Sparta, as well as elsewhere, is nothing to the purpose. The Spartan magnates, in the days of Herodotus and Thucydides, might have acquired wealth in various ways, altogether independently of the original equality of the landed lots, on which the exercise of the rights of citizenship depended. The mere silence of Herodotus in a passage (lib. i.), where he is only mentioning Lycurgus in the most incidental way, can have no weight; and the defects in the slight treatise of Xenophon are so manifest, that any mere omissions can prove nothing. The testimony of Isocrates in another passage of the oration already quoted (287-6), has not the slightest bearing on the question; for there the orator is talking not of the original tenure of landed property under the Lycurgean institutions, but of the freedom of Sparta, during a long course of four hundred years, from violent Agrarian revolutions and other social convulsions-a freedom to be attributed principally, after the general conservative character of the government, to that original equality in the division of property which rendered future Agrarian agitation unnecessary. If these observations are correct, the result of our examination manifestly is, that there is no historical evidence whatever against the Spartan Agrarian laws; and if Mr. Grote's sceptical rejection is to be accepted, it must be based on grounds of internal improbability, which render all external assertion superfluous. It remains now that we look at the matter shortly from this point of view. Agrarian laws have not been fashionable in modern times-least of all in Great Britain. They are contrary to our British instinct of individual liberty, and our national habit of leaving no more power than is absolutely necessary in the hands of the central government. We are apt to look upon them, consequently, as either ideal or revolutionary; but though some valuable discoveries have been made in history since the time of Niebuhr, by interpreting the past through the present, nothing could lead to greater mistakes in the philosophy of ancient social life, than the supposition that it was in all respects like our own. On the contrary, it is certain that in many respects it was as much as possible unlike. It is in the contrasts, not in the identities, which ancient history presents, that great part both of its charm, and of its instructive virtue, consists. The ancient Dalmatians, we are told by Strabo (vii. 315), made a general re-division of their lands every eighth year. Are we to disbelieve this, merely because such an agrarian custom appears to us altogether preposterous, unjust, and impolitic? If so, we must take up David Hume's position, and believe nothing, however well attested, that is contrary to the results of that very undefined range of induction which we call our experience. We shall, therefore, say that there is nothing improbable in the idea that an ancient legislator may have assigned his citizens equal lots of land, however much such a measure may be contrary to English instincts and modern practices. And if we look at the real position of the Dorians as a comparatively small body of invaders encamped in a hostile country which they held in subjugation, we shall see the strongest argument in favour of the existence of an Agrarian law such as was popularly attributed to Lycurgus. An uncontradicted tradition asserts that after conquering the Peloponnesus, the position of the Dorians was for a considerable period extremely uncomfortable. They had the utmost difficulty in holding their ground. Now, in such circumstances, nothing could be more dangerous to the common cause than those feuds and jealousies among themselves which are wont to arise from an unequal distribution of property. As a nation of warriors, who had acquired this new terri tory by the sword, they had been exposed to common perils, and were entitled to a common reward. But against this law of equal national right to the conquered territory, the cupidity and violence of individual chiefs would no doubt prevail; and the discontent hereby caused would breed exactly that state of public danger, in which the safety of all would be consulted by giving an unlimited power of arbitration to some influential person on whom all could rely. Such a national arbiter in matters between debtor and creditor, within the strictly historical period, was Solon, in Athens; such an arbiter, specially in reference to landed property, I conceive Lycurgus to have been when he is spoken of as the author of the Agrarian laws. I do not by any means think myself bound to inquire into the probable correctness of the details of these laws as given by Plutarch; but the fact itself carries with it all the probability that the existing circumstances, the habits of thought of the ancient mind (Müller, Dor. ii. p. 212, English), and the analogy of certain well-known facts in modern history can confer. The secularization of church lands at the French revolution, and the law of succession to landed property then established, operated practically as an Agrarian law, tending both to prevent immense accumulations of property in the hands of individuals, and to create among the newly-constituted proprietors, a broad, permanent interest in the new state of things. An Agrarian law of a different kind was that carried out by Baron Stein in Prussia, under the pressure of the great national humiliation subsequent to the battle of Jena in 1808. On the whole, I am so far from seeing any improbability in the alleged equality of lots, which, according to the universal testimony of the ancients, characterized the Spartan public economy, that it appears to me to be only a necessary part of their general system of equality and brotherhood, within certain well-known and narrowly-drawn limits of aristocratic privilege. Among a race of proprietors as unequal as the present English nobility and gentry, a common mess, the ovooiTiov, so characteristic of Spartan life, would have been an impossibility. With these convictions, I need hardly say that I see no need for having recourse to that "new canon of historical criticism" which Mr. Grote (vol. ii. p. 165, edit. 1862) brings upon the stage for the sake of solving the difficulties connected with the alleged Agrarian law of Lycurgus. This canon, which traces the belief in this law to the heated enthusiasm of certain interested dreamers in the days of Agis IV. and Cleomenes (250 and 222 B.C.), appears to me merely a special application of the thaumaturgic German fashion of creating history out of conjectures, against which I think our British instinct ought to lead us distinctly to protest. The habit of dealing negatively with old national tradition and supplanting it by plausible theories, is always flattering to the ingenuity of scholars, but affords a very questionable basis for anything that can be called history. For myself I do not believe that a royal reformer such as Agis, wishing to move the people to an acceptance of a great measure of Agrarian reform, could VOL. IV. (No. 40.) U do so by appealing to a mere figment, the child of yesterday's dream; but his only hope of success must lie in his being able to clothe the startling aspect of his revolutionary measure with all the attractions that belong to the re-brightening of a faded memory deeply seated in the traditional consciousness of the people. Generally speaking, while I would willingly admit that the outer links and flourishes of national tradition are often invented, I do most firmly believe the trunk and body of any deep-rooted, widely-spread popular belief to be a fact, a material fact in the outward fates of the nation; as the soul of it is a moral fact, often the most important moral fact in the history of a great people. Such facts were the battles of Bannockburn and Drumclog in Scotland; the Norman conquest in England; the legislation of Moses among the Hebrews, and of Lycurgus among the Spartans; the maritime sway of Minos in the isles of the Egean, and the brilliant despotism of the Tarquins in early Rome. Facts of this nature, and the personalities to which they are bound, possess a tenacious vitality in the continued consciousness of a nation, altogether independent of any scrolls of written record by means of which their reality may have been externally attested. [J. S. B.] WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, April 29, 1864. SIR HENRY HOLLAND, Bart. M.D. D.C.L. F.R.S. Vice-President, in the Chair. PROFESSOR ALEXANDER W. WILLIAMSON, F.R.S. PRESIDENT OF THE CHEMICAL SOCIETY, &c. On the Classification of the Elements in relation to their THE speaker proposed to bring under the consideration of the members some of the chemical grounds for doubling the atomic weights of all the metals in Gerhardt's system of atomic weights, excepting the alkali metals, silver, gold, boron, and the metals of the nitrogen series. A change which has been proposed mainly on physical grounds by |