If the ancient Spartans occasionally decimated their slaves, it was not because they looked upon them as a “surplus population,” burdensome upon their estates, but because they feared their growing numbers, while their own ranks were being continually thinned by internecine wars with their neighbours. The idea of a slave being a useless incumbrance, a mere incubus upon the soil, was an idea utterly incompatible with their established custom of regarding slaves not only as property, but as that superior description of property which alone gave value to every other. Accordingly, though amongst the ancient philosophers we find many strange schools and sects, and very many eccentric and incomprehensible doctrines taught, yet nowhere do we meet with any sect or school corresponding with our modern political economists. There is no such philosopher as our Parson Malthus to be found in the whole circle of classic or Biblical lore. Had such a fellow as Malthus shown himself in the days of Alexander the Great, and gone about preaching that the gods had sent too many mouths for the meat and harvests they had provided, not even Diogenes would have associated with such a lunatic; and if the slaves had only got scent of the tendencies of his theory, not Alexander himself could, in all probability, have prevented them from flaying him alive. Fortunately for them, however, there were no Malthuses in the world at that time. In the absence of such philosophers, slaves were not only free to marry and to beget children, but their masters actually regarded every increase in their slaves’ families as a direct gain--a direct increase of the most valuable portion of their property. The idea that at Nature’s feast there was no cover for the new-comer was, at that epoch, an idea that would be as abhorrent to the master’s notions of self-interest as it would have been to the slave’s instincts of procreation and self-preservation.