+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 above (sec. 100), is the case in which the individual voluntarily sets himself in antagonism to the mores of the society. There are cases in which the individual finds himself in involuntary antagonism to the mores of the society, or of some subgroup to which he belongs. If a man passes from one class to another, his acts show the contrast between the mores in which he was bred and those in which he finds himself. The satirists have made fun of the _parvenu_ for centuries. His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the nature of the mores, their power over the individual, their pertinacity against later influences, the confusion in character produced by changing them, and the grip of habit which appears both in the persistence of old mores and the weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is forced to change his mores. He loses the sustaining help of use and wont. He has to acquire a new outfit of it. The traveler also experiences the change from life in one set of mores to life in another. The experience gives him the best power to criticise his native mores from a standpoint outside of them. In the North American colonies white children were often stolen by Indians and brought up by them in their ways. Whether they would later, if opportunity offered, return to white society and white mores, or would prefer to remain with the Indians, seems to have depended on the age at which they were captured. Missionaries have often taken men of low civilization out of the society in which they were born, have educated them, and taught them white men's mores. If a single clear and indisputable case could be adduced in which such a person was restored to his own people and did not revert to their