to the
Indians of Canada--as gods. They are not sure that they are not
descended from gods. They are the Children of the Sun, or what not. The
children of light, who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness
of their subjects. They are at first, probably, civilisers, not
conquerors. For, if tradition is worth anything--and we have nothing
else to go upon--they are at first few in number. They come as settlers,
or even as single sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many who
influence the few, but the few who influence the many.

So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed. But the higher calling
is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon darkened in pride and
selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the
daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of all
that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without
detriment at first to the commonwealth. For, by a well-known law of
heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at
first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of
both. And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are
giants in the earth in those days, men of renown. The Roman empire,
remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had
mingled itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean.

But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above,
as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes
an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere
wealth, corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from
below, but by the monarch from above. The hereditary bondsmen may know

Who would be free,
Himself must strike the blow.

But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He must
become the State. 'Better one tyrant,' as Voltaire said, 'than many.'
Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in
the nearest wood. And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms,
of which modern Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for
Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the
free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in
which men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous
counterfeit, a _Man-god_--a poor human being endowed by public opinion
with the