be that
Italy could only difficultly attain national unity at any time;
but that once such unity was attained, she would be bound to play
an enormous part. No doubt again and again she has been a center
of empire; it is always your ex-melting-pot that is.

Who were the earliest Italians? The earliest, it least, that we
can guess at?--Once on a time the peninsula was colonized by folk
who sailed in through the Straits of Gibraltar from Ruta and
Daitya, those island fragments of Atlantis; and (says Madame
Blavatsky) you should have found a pocket of these colonists
surviving in Latium, strong enough for the most part to keep the
waves of invaders to the north of them, and the refugees to the
high Apennines. Another relic of them you would have found,
probably, driven down into the far south; and such a relic, I
understand, the Iapygians were.

One more ethnic influence,--an important one. Round about the
year 1000 B.C., all Europe was in dead pralaya, while West Asia
was in high manvantara: under which conditions, as I suggested
just now, such parts as the Lombard Plain and Tuscany might tempt
West Asians of enterprise;--as Spain and Sicily tempted the
Moslems long afterwards. Supposing such a people came in; they
would be, while the West Asian manvantara was in being, much more
cultured and powerful than their Italian neighbors; but the
waning centuries of their manvantara would coincide with the
first and orient portion of the European one; so, as soon as
that should begin to touch Italy, things would begin to equalize
themselves; till at last, as Europe drew towards noon and West
Asia towards evening, these West Asians of Etruria would go the
way of the Spanish Moors. There you have the probable history of
the Etruscans.

All Roman writers say they came from Lydia by sea; which
statement could only have been a repetition of what the Etruscans
said about themselves. The matter is much in dispute; but most
likely there is no testimony better than the ancient one. Some
authorities are for Lydia; some are for the Rhaetian Alps; some
are for calling the Etruscans 'autochthonous,'--which I hold to
be, like _Mesopotamia,_ a 'blessed word.' Certainly the Gauls
drove them out of Lombardy, and some of them, as refugees, up
into the Rhaetian Alps,--sometime after the European manvantara
began in 870. We cannot read their language, and do not know
enough about it to connect it even with the Turanian Group; but
w