MAKING CHILDREN THE PROPERTY OF THE STATE.--The principles which were embodied in the scheme proposed by Plato, in his "Republic," to bring about an improvement in the race are mainly two: First, restriction on the formation of procreative unions; second, infanticide. The breaking up of private or separate families necessarily resulted from the operation of his "marriage" regulations, and was intended to emphasize the idea which Plato, like Lycurgus, insisted on, that the children belonged to the State. Lycurgus sought to enforce the same idea by allowing wives to have intercourse with other men than their husbands, thus making children "common" in some sense, while retaining the separate family intact. Thus he introduced, or rather it should be said, established a modified form of polyandrous marriage; Plato's system, on the other hand, being one of mere pairing, as in the breeding of animals. In either case the union of very near relations was not permitted, that is, between brother and sister, or parent and child. Yet Lycurgus allowed marriage between a half-brother and sister by the same mother. Curiously enough, this was forbidden by the Athenian law, which permitted a brother and sister by the same father only to intermarry. The Greek rule, as laid down in Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities," was that "proximity of blood or consanguinity was not, with some few exceptions, a bar to marriage," although direct lineal descent was so. Moreover, there was no attempt to enforce consanguineous marriages, so as to ensure purity of blood, such as was customary among the Incas of Peru, the laws of which required that the oldest son and daughter of the sovereign should intermarry because the Incas were descended from the Sun, and the Sun had married his sister the Moon, and had united in marriage his two first children! A more practical reason was found in the rule that the kingdom should be inherited through both parents. Hence it was not permitted to mix the blood of the Sun, or rather of those who claimed solar descent, with that of men.