stament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic
changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable
event. They have been preparing, perhaps, for centuries. They are the
result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have
been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more
perfectly understood.

For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next,
if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by
long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.

Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon, the
powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the
Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers
seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire
itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.

It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that
spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a
cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I
believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be
done, someone must come and do it--do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by
some single rash act--like that first fatal shot fired at Fort
Sumter--which makes, as by an electric spark, a whole nation flash into
enduring flame.

But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.

I know not whether the _Cyropaedia_ is much read in your schools and
universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to see,
either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every
young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is
better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's _Arcadia_ or
Spenser's _Fairy Queen_--the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And
the moral of the book--ponder it well, all young men who have the chance
or the hope of exercising authority among your fellow-men, the noble and
most Christian moral of that heath