yet
an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all
races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till
the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he,
and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race,
who first invented for himself and his children after him a--bow and
arrow.

The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak
of him in second place--was the man who was the potential ancestor of the
whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who
first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it
home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making
it draw--presumably by its tail--a fashion which endured long in Ireland,
and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century.
A great aristocrat must that man have become. A greater still he who
first substituted the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first
thought of wheels. A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole
for bearing up his chariot; for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot,
became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily
oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of
iron. Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans--none of them
improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a
race who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to
ride instead of drive. A great aristocrat, again, must he have been
among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his
horse's back, accommodating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a
centaur, half-man, half-horse. That invention must have tended, in the
first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of
firearms. A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal
and free. Equal because a man on a horse would feel himself a man
indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a
self-help, a skill, a consciousness of power, a personal pride and
vanity, which would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders might
be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. They could never become
_gleboe adscripti_, bound to the soil, as long as they could take horse
and saddle, and away. History gives us more than one glimpse of such
tribes--the scourge and terror of t