Part 7 (1/2)

There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you how the prie has, or at least may have, become the civilised man For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I attach very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that we have no facts The facts are lost

Of course, if you assuh to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own satisfaction If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the inter And, indeed, if modern philosophers had stuckverb 'make,' and tried to sho soels, or Gods-e into the sage-theyto keep their feet upon the firround of actual experience But while their theory is, that the sow's ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who have studied the history which lies behind the, and sorrowing and failing around the doards and not upwards, and by noitself, save in the increase of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and ga-tables, and that which pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the old Stoics-?p???-I withholdabout the h learned friends, know I suspect very little either

Eldest of things, Divine Equality:

so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth For, if, as I believe, the hu their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has been known on earth during historic times But that equality was at best, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child

Divine-therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation, even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as I trust, not in vain

The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality, but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, and yet by aitself by the very iants in the earth in those days, And Nihty hunter; and his gah the dies

What we do see, is-I know not whether you will think me superstitious or old-fashi+oned, but so I hold-very much what the earlier books of the Bible show us under syyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics, legends, fragends-in the New World as in the Old-all tell the same story Not the story without an end, but the story without a beginning As in the Hindoo cosony, the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on-what? No man knows

I do not know I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says, till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand-as is held by certain anthropologists, soes who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and reindeer in North-western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few hundred thousand years ago These sturdy little fellows-the kinsmen probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps-could have been but the avant-couriers, or itives fro northward fro catastrophe of the age of ice, once h to support h to get the same, by all means fair or foul No The tortoise of the hue may stand on an ape-like creature I do not say that he does not I do not say that he does I do not know; and no man knows But at least I say that the civilised e non upon the earth For first, it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more important to an inductive philosopher, there is no proof of it I see no savages beco really civilised men-that is-not merely men ill ape the outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our ideas; not merely that; but truly civilised men ill think for themselves, invent for theht and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it on unextinguished, and trans back every hted by those from whom they received it: and who are bound-reht it for theive freely to all their fellow-iven to thee of how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is capable of receiving and of using

Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as I a itself It is a bold saying

I stand by my assertion: le instance; for ive her opinion than I have now, of the unassisted capabilities of un somewhen, somewhere, with soin?

I have said already that I do not know But I have had my dream-like the philosopher-and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I shall not be ashainnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to the in? What if the few first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever syin of civilisation, the education of a her race than man?

What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper and wider application than divines have been wont to think? What if individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out froht be the lights of the earth, and the salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn, abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the htened? To increase the inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of decreasing therace, by their own self-sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and even ht to think?

So runs my dream If, after I have confessed to it, you think htened 19th century, I will go on

At all events, e see at the beginning of all known and half-known history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward and material kind Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China, Hindostan The first glimpses of the world are always like those which the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives us As it was 400 years ago in Ao, or 40,000 for aught I know Nay, if anyone should ask-And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk beneath the Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder save-We have no proofs as yet

There looend, into the as yet dim dawn of history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans-colossal monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, custoly always of a superior and conquering race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of older conquered races; of imported slaves, too, and their descendants

But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? You enquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves They are usually-I had alners They have crossed the neighbouring e, like Manco Cassae and Maotten when At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer, than the aborigines They are to them-as Jacques Cartier was to the Indians of Canada-as Gods They are not sure that they are not descended from Gods They are the Children of the Sun, or what not The children of light, who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness of their subjects They are at first, probably, civilisers, not conquerors For, if tradition is worth anything-and we have nothing else to go upon-they are at first few in nues It is, in all tradition, not the many who influence the few, but the feho influence the many

So aristocracies, in the true sense, are forht is soon darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take thes up and increases, without detriment at first to the commonwealth For, by a well-kno of heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of both And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of iants in the earth in those days, er than when the old Patrician blood had led itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean

But it does not last Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above, as well as from below The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdoain, one ofand corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from below, but by the monarch from above The hereditary bondsmen may know

Who would be free, Himself must strike the blow

But they dare not, know not how The king must do it for them He must become the State 'Better one tyrant,' as Voltaire said, 'than many'

Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in the nearest wood And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotis speciypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and si a God-man, worshi+p the hideous counterfeit, a _Man-God_-a poor hu endowed by public opinion with the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of hue of every civilisation-even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this earth the last in ancient ti the h all teers, the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus beheld us, with respect and awe, a our German forests, and saw in us the future masters of the Roman Empire

Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind But shall we despise those ent before us, and on whose accumulated laboursstand?

Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not show our reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old Persians, we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, and devotion to the God of light and life and good? And shall we not feel pity, instead of contenorances, excesses, failures-so excusable into solve for themselves for the first time the deepest social and political problems of humanity

Yes, those old despotisms, we trust, are dead and never to revive But their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our friends and predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Orainst disorder Confusedly they fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled the breach and filled the trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to us an easy victory-what may be to us, yet, a shameful ruin

For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? What if the light which is in us should become darkness? For myself, when I look upon the responsibilities of the free nations ofof that liberty in which I delight-and to keep which I freely, too, could die-I rather say, in fear and tre, God help us on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make us free; responsible, each individual of us, not only to ourselves, but to Him and all mankind