he
system operated, in both the classical states, as a selection against
the superior elements in the population. This effect was intensified by
the political system. The city became an arena of political struggle for
the goods of life which it was a shame to work for. Tyrannies and
democracies alternated with each other, but both alike used massacre and
proscription, and both thought it policy to get rid of troublesome
persons, that is, of those who had convictions and had courage to avow
them. Every able man became a victim of terrorism, exerted by idle
market-place loafers. The abuse of democratic methods by
those-who-had-not to plunder those-who-had must also have had much to do
with the decline of economic power, and with the general decline of joy
in life and creative energy. It would also make marriage and children a
great and hopeless burden. Abortion and sex vice both directly and
indirectly lessened population, by undermining the power of
reproduction, while their effect to destroy all virile virtues could not
fail to be exerted.[139] It was another symptom of disease in the mores
that the number of males in the Roman empire greatly exceeded the
number of females.[140] The Roman system used up women.

+110. Sparta.+ The case of Sparta is especially interesting because the
Spartan mores were generally admired and envied in the fourth century
B.C. They were very artificial and arbitrary. They developed into a
catastrophe. The population declined to such a point that it was like
group suicide. The nation incased itself in fossilized mores and
extremest conservatism, by which its own energies were crushed. The
institutions produced consequences which were grotesque compared with
what had been expected from them.[141]

+111. Optimism of prosperity.+ "I apprehend that the key to the joyful
character of the antique religions known to us [in western Asia] lies in
the fact that they took their shape in communities that were progressive
and, on the whole, prosperous." Weak groups were exterminated. Those
which survived "had all the self-confidence and elasticity that are
engendered by success in the struggle of life." "The religious gladness
of the Semites tended to assume an orgiastic character and become a sort
of intoxication of the senses, in which anxiety and sorrow were drowned
for the moment."[142]

+112. Antagonism between an individual and the mores.+ The case of
dissent from the mores, which was considered