n long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions.
But the student of history, the observer of politics, know that nothing
is more _un_natural. For "institutions make men." And when amid a people
used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of
an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that
initiative force--the "men who in the beginnings make institutions."

This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between
Egyptian and Hebrew policy are not of form but of essence. The tendency
of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other, to
individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! from out the strongest
and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From
between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human
liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant
proclamation of the rights of man.

Consider what Egypt was. The very grandeur of her monuments testify to
the enslavement of the people--are the enduring witnesses of a social
organization that rested on the masses an immovable weight. That narrow
Nile Valley, the cradle of the arts and sciences, the scene, perhaps, of
the greatest triumphs of the human mind, is also the scene of its most
abject enslavement. In the long centuries of its splendor its lord,
secure in the possession of irresistible temporal power, and securer
still in the awful sanctions of a mystical religion, was as a god on
earth, to cover whose poor carcass with a tomb befitting his state
hundreds of thousands toiled away their lives. For the classes who came
next to him were all the sensuous delights of a most luxurious
civilization, and high intellectual pleasures which the mysteries of the
temple hid from vulgar profanation. But for the millions who constituted
the base of the social pyramid there was but the lash to stimulate their
toil, and the worship of beasts to satisfy the yearnings of the soul.
From time immemorial to the present day the lot of the Egyptian peasant
has been to work and to starve, that those above him might live
daintily. He has never rebelled. The spirit for that was long ago
crushed out of him by institutions which made him what he is. He knows
but to suffer and to die.

Imagine what opportune circumstances we may, yet to organize and carry
on a movement resulting in the release of a great people from such a
soul-subduing tyranny, backed by a