But education had also to consult the happiness of the children as well as the happiness of the community, although in a lesser degree. This may seem a startling statement to make with regard to Spartan education. Nevertheless, I believe it to be strictly true. It must be remembered that all our accounts of the rigours and horrors of Spartan methods come from Athenian writers who in all probability had never been to Lakedaimon. Xenophon, who had his sons educated there, gives a much milder, and wholly eulogistic, account. The somewhat hedonistic Attic visitor must have watched Spartan games and exercises with much the feelings of a French visitor at an English public school; he found it difficult to realise that the boys underwent such hardships of their own free will. Then we must remember what the Spartan boys were. They were a picked breed of peculiar toughness, strength, and health; for centuries every invalid had been exposed at birth or rejected as incapable of the school-system. Generation after generation had been trained to be thick-skinned and stout-hearted; pluck and endurance were hereditary, and asceticism was a national characteristic. The whole system, with its perpetual fighting, its rough games, its hardships, its fagging and “roughing-it” in the woods, is just what boys of this sort might be expected to evolve for themselves because they liked it. I have already pointed out, in my account of the Spartan schools, how very similar are many of the customs which grew up at the older English public schools, mainly on the boys’ own initiative. If English boys, brought up on the whole much less roughly, evolved such customs of their own free will, the young Spartans may reasonably be supposed to have accepted them gladly. One significant token of this survives. The violent and sometimes fatal floggings of the epheboi at the altar of Artemis Orthia were entirely voluntary on the part of the victims; yet there was no lack of candidates even in Plutarch’s days. The Spartan school-system was, in fact, an exact expression of the national characteristics, and accordingly was entirely acceptable to the Spartan boys.