finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great
meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father's
farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when
they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told
them, "Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free
with me."

Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of
the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic
changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable
event. They have been preparing, perhaps for centuries. They are the
result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have
been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more
perfectly understood.

For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next,
if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by
long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.

Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon, the
powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the
Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers
seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire