From the very outset Plato and Aristotle adopt quite definite principles. They assume that the State is to interfere everywhere and control the whole life of man. Thus the splendid Athenian democracy in which Plato lived had no power to wean him from his somewhat narrow prejudices. He despised the goods he possessed, and longed for a Spartan ideal, though its defects were plain enough before his eyes.[54] Still worse, the wide vista opened by Alexander into a larger fusion of ideas, and into widely various forms of society, had no power to emancipate the intellect of Aristotle from its ingrained Hellenic narrowness. It is necessary to make this strong protest at the outset, on account of the chorus of admiration sung by the pedants and pedagogues of modern days over these thoroughly unpractical and retrograde theories. One fact will speak volumes to the modern reader. Both of them look upon a small number of citizens, and, indeed, a small limit of territory, as essential to their schemes, no accurate or perpetual supervision by State police and direction being possible either in a great city or a large territory.[55] This will in itself show how antiquated they must have seemed even in the next century, when the Greeks woke to the ambition of ruling over kingdoms in the East. § 63. And yet there were some points on which these thinkers, especially Plato, were far more thoroughgoing than we are, chiefly from a total absence of that sentiment or sentimentality which infects modern life. For Plato, both in the “Republic” and the “Laws,” insists that education will be of little avail if children are brought into the world deformed in body and warped in mind by the bad physical and mental condition of their parents. On some of these cases Greek society was agreed with him. In most states a deformed child was exposed either to die or to be picked up by some one who might run the risk of bringing it up to make a household slave.[56] For in most states, and certainly at Sparta, it would have been held a crime to propagate hereditary disease; and men were spared the disgusting spectacle of the scrofulous or deaf-and-dumb heir to a great name being courted in matrimony to perpetuate the miseries or the vices of his progenitors.