rdly in keeping with the
historical traditions inherited from our school days. It savors of a
sort of heresy and passes far beyond the limits of popular opinion.
There is a peculiar unanimity among all historians to state without
reservation that the greatest civilization the world has ever known
was pre-eminently Aryan, but historians are not always to be relied
upon. They write for their own race and times and are careful to give
as little credit as possible to races and events which fall within the
pale of their prejudices. I question, however, if there is to be
gained any ultimate good by subverting truth and popularizing error.
Indeed, I believe that if to-day our historians, authors, press and
pulpit would give the public the truth as far as it is possible to
attain it, to-morrow would find us filled with a new vigor and a fresh
determination to conquer the wrongs and inconsistencies of human life.

The old idea of the Grecian civilization was that it sprung, like
Minerva, full armed from the brow of Zeus. It seemed to have no
tangible beginning. The fabled kings and heroes of the Homeric Age,
with their palaces and strongholds, were said to have been humanized
sun-myths; their deeds but songs woven by wandering minstrels to win
their meed of bread. Yet there has always been a suspicion among
scholars that this view was wrong. The more we study the moral aspects
of humanity the more we become convinced that the flower and fruit of
civilization are evolved according to laws as immutable as those laws
governing the manifestations of physical life. Historians have written
that Greece was invaded by Aryans about 1400 B.C., and that henceforth
arose the wonderful civilization; but the student knows that such was
an impossibility and that some vital factor has been left out of the
equation. When the Aryans invaded Greece they were savages from
Neolithic Europe and could not possibly have possessed the high
artistic capacities and rich culture necessary for the unfolding of
AEgean civilization. "Of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a
bramble bush gather they grapes."

Speaking of the two foremost Grecian states, Herodotus writes as
follows: "These are the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, the former of
Doric, the latter of Ionic blood. And, indeed, these two nations had
held from very early times the most distinguished place in Greece, the
one being Pelasgic, the other a Hellenic people, and the one having
never quitte