est, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in
the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child.
Divine--therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one
of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation,
even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for
short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as
I trust, not in vain.

The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality,
but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself,
and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very
means which it uses to keep itself alive.

'There were giants in the earth in those days, And Nimrod began to be a
mighty one in the earth'--

A mighty hunter; and his game was man.

No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mists of bygone ages.

What we do see, is--I know not whether you will think me superstitious or
old-fashioned, but so I hold--very much what the earlier books of the
Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman histories,
Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics,
legends, fragments of legends--in the New World as in the Old--all tell
the same story. Not the story without an end, but the story without a
beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant,
and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on--what? No man knows.
I do not know. I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says,
till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand--as is
held by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally
dear to me--upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and
reindeer in North-western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few
hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little fellows--the kinsmen
probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps--could have been but the
avant-couriers, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of
mankind--spreading northward from the Tropics, into climes becoming,
after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial enough to
support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong enough to
get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. The tortoise of the human
race does not stand on a savage. The savage may stand on an ape-like
creature. I do not say that he does not.