MODERN SPARTANS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 30 January 1912, Page 6

MODERN SPARTANS.

Whipping and exposure without clothes as a training in endurance :>f ■cold for the North Canadian native boys has curious points of resemblance to the training of the boys of ancient Sparta. They also were inured to cold by being made to go barefoot and to wear the same clothes summer and winter; and they also underwent whipping. Only, cold seems to have had nothing to do with the latter, The scourgings of Spartan boys before the altar of Artemis Orthia are supposed to have been a relic oj hu/nan sacrifice (in some cases boys actually died under the lash.) But they were undoubtedly "utilised as training in, and a test of, hardihood —the boys competing to see who could endure the most without a sound. And how such Spartan "training of boys among the natives of Northern Canada would have appealed to one of the Camerons of Lochiel. Sir Francis Galton records that, when bivouacknig with his son in the snow, Cameron noticed that the lad had rolled a snowball to make a pillow. He thereupon rose and kicked it away, saying sternly, "No effeminacy, boy!"