ns
opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her
social life was such that none but very able men could take any
pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men
of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus
by a system of partly unconscious selection she built up a magnificent
breed of human animals, which in the space of one century--viz.,
between 530 and 430 B. C.--produced the following illustrious persons,
fourteen in number:--

_Statesmen and Commanders._--Themistocles (mother an alien),
Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon (son of Miltiades), Pericles (son of
Xanthippus, the victor at Mycale).

_Literary and Scientific Men._--Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato.

_Poets._--AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.

_Sculptor._--Phidias.

We are able to make a closely approximate estimate of the population
that produced these men, because the number of the inhabitants of
Attica has been a matter of frequent inquiry, and critics appear at
length to be quite agreed in the general results.... The average
ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very
nearly two grades higher than our own--that is, about as much as our
race is above that of the African negro. This estimate, which may seem
prodigious to some, is confirmed by the quick intelligence and high
culture of the Athenian commonalty, before whom literary works were
recited, and works of art exhibited, of a far more severe character
than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the
calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the
contents of a railway book-stall.

We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this
marvelously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly
lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more
ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and
consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population
were of a heterogeneous class. In a small sea-bordered country, where
emigration and immigration are constantly going on, and where the
manners are as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of
which I speak, the purity of a race would necessarily fail. It can be
therefore no surprise to us, though it has been a severe misfortune to
humanity, that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if
it had maintained its excellence, and had multipli