heir
own property, would be deprived of the most valuable discipline." There
is FREE EDUCATION for you, two thousand and seventy-six years before the
date of your first Massachusetts free school; and the theory of free
education completely stated.

4. Deserters or cowards in battle had to sit in women's dresses in the
Forum three days.

5. With regard to the amendment of laws, any man or woman who moved one
did it with a noose round his neck, and was hanged if the people refused
it. Only three laws were ever amended, therefore, all which are recorded
in the history. Observe that the women might move amendments,--and think
of the simplicity of legislation!

6. The law provided for cash payments, and the government gave no
protection for those who sold on credit.

7. Their communication with other nations was perfectly free.

I might give more instances. I should like to tell some of the curious
stories which illustrate this simple legislation. Poor Charondas himself
fell a victim to it. One of the laws provided that no man should wear a
sword into the public assembly. No Cromwells there! Unfortunately, by
accident, Charondas wore his own there one day. Brave fellow! when the
fault was pointed out, he killed himself with it.

Now do you wonder that a city where there were no calumniators, no long
credit, no bills at the grocers, no fighting at town meetings, no
amendments to the laws, no intentional and open association with
profligates, and where everybody was educated by the state to letters,
proved a comfortable place to live in? It is of the old Sybaris that the
coppersmith and the rose-leaf stories are told; and it was the new
Sybaris that made the laws. But do you not see that there is one spirit
in the whole? Here was a nation which believed that the highest work of
a nation was to train its people. It did not believe in fight, like
Milon or Heenan or the old Spartans; it did not believe in legislation,
like Massachusetts and New York; it did not believe in commerce, like
Carthage and England. It believed in men and women. It respected men and
women. It educated men and women. It gave their rights to men and women.
And so the Spartans called them effeminate. And the Greek Reader made
fun of them. But perhaps the people who lived there were indifferent to
the opinions of the Spartans and of the Greek Reader. Herodotus lived
there till he died; wrote his history there, among other things. Lysias,
the orator, t