SVG images aren’t bitmaps, so (unless I’m missing something) you can’t do spriting like you can with other images files used on web pages (see http://www.alistapart.com/articles
You can use 'traditional' CSS sprite techniques to slice up SVG images with background position, here's a quick example, though it does get a little confusing if you also start using background-size. It's probably easier if you define a size on your SVG image: