which is amply scattered over its pages. History demonstrates that neither climate nor certain geographical conditions enervate mind and body, disabling men from mental and industrial laborious activity. It shows that man is subject to these powerful external influences, that under their action the events of his life are variously combined and manifested. Man reacts on all nature or the medium wherein he moves and works. Every thing in creation is subject to reciprocal action,-stagnation is death. Man is the centre, the focus of the universe; in him nature or matter reaches the highest combination with mind. Thus he reproduces and reflects all the countless variety and combinations of those two essences, their modifications and graduations, their affinities, repulsions, attractions. Thus he is versatile in his utterances and actions, in his modes and methods, in his ways of shaping out the fruits of his mental and plastic productivity. For this reason, in certain conditions, under certain combinations of events and of influences, under the inward impulse of faculties and propensities, some of them may acquire greater fulness and power of expansion than others; these in this manner becoming crushed, crowded out, remaining in an embryonic state. So in inorganic as in organic nature-from various proportions and combinations of rather a small number of chemical elements, come forth an innumerable variety of ores and stones, of colors, flavors, tastes, of forms and powers in the vegetable and in the animal realm.

The greatest, the most crushing and difficult material works and labors have been accomplished in the hot regions of Asia, at epochs when man did not possess such various scientific means and tools to bridle and master the reluctant elements of nature. There at remote times was first accomplished the hardest, the rudimental task of civilization. To-day a blast of powder severs immense

blocks of granite; machinery cuts, separates and carries them to various destinations. But are the first inventors in mechanics not even more astonishing than those who inherited the results of their efforts, and of their successful or frustrated attempts? The man who understood and applied the first rudiments of mechanics, probably spent as much power of observation, combination and calculation as did Fulton, for whom the former prepared and smoothed the path. And so with all other sciences, inventions, industries and productions. Daily experience shows how unconquerable and deadly to man is the exuberant vegetation of hot and tropical regions, how difficult in those regions to subject nature to the power, to the will, to the handling of man. Far more in the Southern clime does nature resist and defend itself than in that of the less reproductive and moderate North, where now civilization shines more brightly. But the plains of Egypt, Syria, and of the Indus, cut by canals, watered by art, highly cultivated and nourishing millions and millions at the remotest times, those regions covered then with rich, powerful and monumental cities, swarming with industrious, enterprising and therefore skilful and intelligent populations, bear witness to the falsehood of the assertion concerning the inability of the Southern races for hard labor, and of the absolute enervating influence of climate. What an immense amount of labor, skill, industry, invention were spent, used up, before those regions reached that high state of culture which they enjoyed forty or fifty centuries ago. The gigantic ruins of the Egyptian civilization show a high degree of development in the mechanical and architectural arts, as well as of others. And the Brahminic remains? Energy, industry, refinement flourished on the Indus when Greece was probably occupied only by savage barbarians, when the man of the now proud North

had scarcely a hovel wherein to crouch, or the skin of a wild beast to cover his shivering body. In their times those Southern tropical regions were the seat and representatives of the highest degree of culture and civilization, which man was to reach in a given epoch; in the same way as the man of the Northern regions represents it now. Corresponding mental culture of course was the twin, or rather the incentive to material progress, and mental culture, as reproduced in a higher comprehension of social duties in social organization, manifested itself in the past, in the remotest antiquity. Love of country, the extension over all members of a given society of the means of information, the absence of social privileges of caste can be traced out to nearly immemorial times, even beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family.

The antiquity of the now slightly treated Chinese civilization is not ascertained. But for the whole period of positive history, this civilization seems to have made little if even any progress, having at that remote epoch already reached a remarkably diversified and eminent development. It is still an unsolved historical problem, whether the Chinese received civilization from Egypt or India, or transmitted it to those regions. Such an antiquity proves at any rate an inventive and exertive power of the Turanic or Altaic race. When the proud Indo-Germans were shrouded in torpidity and savageness, the Chinese cultivated the soil, the arts; had various manufactures, had mental development; the art of writing was familiar to them. The society of the ancient, as well as of the European world, was and is based on distinctions and privileges of castes; was and is construed out of social superpositions. Slavery under various forms existed among all the nations. No traces of either of these evils exist in the Chinese social structure. Castes, privileges and slavery

are still the great chains obstructing, impeding the free development of the Christian, as they did that of the ancient world. The whole social history is the reproduction of the struggles and of the attempts of men to free themselves from those troublesome deformities. The highest conception of social advancement not yet attained even in our epoch, is the recognition of the position of the individual in society, not according to inherited privileges and accidents of birth, but according to his individually acquired mental and scientific distinctions and accomplishments. On them, however, has depended social position in China for uncountable centuries, and nowhere are to be found traces of existence of social, civil or military slavery. There are, to be sure, many black spots and deficiences in the Chinese social state and civilization-many wherein they are greatly inferior, but from the other side the above-mentioned phenomena throw many of our boasted superiorities into the shade. Knowledge, such as exists in China, is brought within the reach of the whole population; and with all our facilities for printing and diffusing of letters, we are left far in the background by the Chinese, among whom for long centuries the habit of reading is as general among the masses as any other function of daily life.

Books are at a price lower than the smallest alms. The whole Empire forms a leaf, covered with written sentences and axioms of their moralists. Schools accordingly existed there for the masses of the people at a period when European nations did not even dream of the availability of learning. Printing, that great engine of modern progress, was probably known to the Chinese when Harlem was a wilderness. The use of powder was undoubtedly brought to Europe from China. In India the education of the people through public schools, the universal knowledge of reading and writing, date back

from a time when neither of these accomplishments was thought of as a necessary element in the existence of the masses. They were not judged indispensable even in Greece and Athens; nor even for long centuries afterwards in Europe, where even now more than half of its population is wholly illiterate. The Mahometan conquest and the English dominion ruined the Hindoo people, destroyed schools, destroyed arts and industry. Oppression and the turn of human events enervated and debased these regions, and in every way exerted over them their baneful influ

ence.

The facts which constitute civilization, are scattered here and there over various regions and various nations. Times and circumstances are seemingly confounded. But there is a wonderful chain stretching over the course of centuries, enclosing the world and accommodating itself to the ebb and flow of human affairs.

Many civilizing rays warmed Greece, reaching there from the East, and to those the Greeks and the Romans added again their own products. When the men of Northern Europe made their appearance in history, they became initiated into a new life; a light was at once transmitted to them, and however feeble were its morning rays, they alone quickened the germ of modern civilization. The love of freedom, the attempts to establish society on great democratic foundations were neither the specialty of German races, nor did they originate with them. Both were pre-existent in history; they grew to maturity under the combined action of Christianity and human events; and the indestructible and eternal element in the essential destiny of man.

Two races especially emerged out of the ruins of the Roman Empire and inherited its civilization. The one, the Celtic, was already partly interwoven with the Ro