centuries) is too absurd for
discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of
which we have any record as existing in the past, exists at the present
moment. A British carpenter or stonemason may point out that he gets
twice as much money for his labor as his father did in the same trade,
and that his suburban house, with its bath, its cottage piano, its
drawingroom suite, and its album of photographs, would have shamed the
plainness of his grandmother's. But the descendants of feudal barons,
living in squalid lodgings on a salary of fifteen shillings a week
instead of in castles on princely revenues, do not congratulate the
world on the change. Such changes, in fact, are not to the point. It has
been known, as far back as our records go, that man running wild in the
woods is different to man kennelled in a city slum; that a dog seems to
understand a shepherd better than a hewer of wood and drawer of water
can understand an astronomer; and that breeding, gentle nurture and
luxurious food and shelter will produce a kind of man with whom the
common laborer is socially incompatible. The same thing is true of
horses and dogs. Now there is clearly room for great changes in the
world by increasing the percentage of individuals who are carefully bred
and gently nurtured even to finally making the most of every man and
woman born. But that possibility existed in the days of the Hittites as
much as it does to-day. It does not give the slightest real support to
the common assumption that the civilized contemporaries of the Hittites
were unlike their civilized descendants to-day.

This would appear the truest commonplace if it were not that the
ordinary citizen's ignorance of the past combines with his idealization
of the present to mislead and flatter him. Our latest book on the new
railway across Asia describes the dulness of the Siberian farmer and
the vulgar pursepride of the Siberian man of business without the least
consciousness that the sting of contemptuous instances given might
have been saved by writing simply "Farmers and provincial plutocrats
in Siberia are exactly what they are in England." The latest professor
descanting on the civilization of the Western Empire in the fifth
century feels bound to assume, in the teeth of his own researches, that
the Christian was one sort of animal and the Pagan another. It might as
well be assumed, as indeed it generally is assumed by implication,
that a mur