res, it must be remembered, did at least
that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage
tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other,
speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing
utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people
who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to
their own fiends at home. Among such as these, empires did introduce
order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and
humanity. They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human
race till they had moulded them into one. They did it cruelly, clumsily,
ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was
not--alas, alas!--done somewhat ill?

Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy
Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first does
our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did
our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the
future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus--so strangely are all great
times and great movements of the human family linked to each other--to
his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and
I am speaking to you at this moment.

It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for
you, however clumsily, once more.

In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now
call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the
sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest
blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek,
and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered
thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some
lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which
left them but two months of summer to ten of winter.

They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs
of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered and
intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of
their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but
short-lived Median Empire. 'Soft countries,' said Cyrus himself--so runs
the tale--'gave birth to small men. No region produced at once