lowed to
save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on
him, if he chose.

Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of
nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the
mediaeval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous
subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all
over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan,
and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race.

One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building
which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can
no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of
weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of
the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it
can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking
strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles
topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in
the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of
ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept
away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up
rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their
new dwelling, if they build at all.

The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the
material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's
development or decadence at the time when the work was done.

It is only by doing something of that sort that we can at all realize
the connection between the settlement of the shepherds, the Rome of the
Caesars, and the desolate and scantily populated fighting ground of the
Barons, upon which, with the Renascence, the city of the later Popes
began to rise under Nicholas the Fifth. And lastly, without a little of
such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even
faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts
of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those
primeval times. Read Caesar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise
reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his
conquests. Read Horace, and attempt to see a little of what he describes
in his good-natured, easy way. Read the correspondence of the younger
Pliny w