We may now sum up the results of our observations of the Spartans and their institutions. From the earliest times they devoted themselves to acquiring and cultivating those qualities which would enable them to excel as a people of conquerors and of slave-owners: but in doing this they lost most of the other virtues, and especially the qualities which make intelligent citizens. There were few political questions in which the Spartans took any interest: they did not make new laws; they had no commerce, no gold or silver except in the treasury of the state: the only subjects debated in their assemblies were questions of war, peace, alliances, disputed successions to the throne, and the like: so that the assembly did not meet save when such questions arose, or when one of the annual elections of Ephors came round. They did not even care what men were set over them as rulers: their method of electing Ephors was childish, and the elections are generally if not always passed over in silence by the historians. Nor is their indifference surprising: for their real ruler was, not the Ephors nor any living men, but their rigid system of custom and discipline: and under that system it mattered little which of them was in command and which had to obey, since nearly every Spartan was competent to issue such orders as custom and usage dictated, and every other Spartan was prepared to obey them. If this estimate is a just one, it follows that the really important part of the Spartan institutions was not the political part but the disciplinary: that their discipline destroyed their capacity for political activity: that the Spartans from the age of Theopompus till the Peloponnesian war were rather a military order than a political body: and that they and their institutions cannot be very interesting or instructive to students of Politics, except as showing how a community, which was originally political, may lose the characteristics by which political communities are distinguished. After the Peloponnesian war the Spartans got access to rich spoil at a distance from their own country and began to think less of their common interests as slave-owners at home, than of their individual hopes of plundering the inhabitants of the cities of Asia Minor. In consequence many of the Helots were emancipated to serve as soldiers in foreign war, and the intensity of the oppression of the rest was probably diminished: while on the other hand each individual Spartan acted no longer for the common good of the Spartiatæ but for the sole good of himself, and the government was conducted in the interest not of the whole ruling caste but of that smaller number among them who had been successful in enriching themselves.