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 America, so it was in North Africa and in
Asia 4000 years ago, 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 loom up, out of the darkness of legend, 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, customs, creeds; with
aristocracies, priesthoods--seemingly 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
inquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves. They are
usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners. They have
crossed the neighbouring mountains. The have come by sea, like Dido to
Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Belle to America, and they have
sometimes forgotten 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