Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself.  It is a bold saying.  I stand by my assertion:  most happy to find myself confuted, even in a single instance; for my being wrong would give me, what I can have no objection to possess, a higher opinion than I have now, of the unassisted capabilities of my fellow-men.

But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person, or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin?

I have said already that I do not know.  But I have had my dream—­like the philosopher—­and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I shall not be ashamed to tell it here.  And it is this: 

What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous and supernatural likewise?  What if that be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its origin?  What if the few first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever symbols, to the actual and the only possible origin of civilisation, the education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race than man?  What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper and wider application than divines have been wont to think?  What if individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for a special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the salt of the world?  What if they have, each in their turn, abused that divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers, of the less enlightened?  To increase the inequalities of nature by their own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into the equality of grace, by their own self-sacrifice?  What if the Bible after all was right, and even more right than we were taught to think?

So runs my dream.  If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still worth listening to, in this enlightened nineteenth century, I will go on.

At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward and material kind.  Do you demur?  Then recollect, I pray you, that the three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China, Hindostan.  The first glimpses of the world are always like those which the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives us.  As it was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in Asia 4000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know.  Nay, if anyone should ask—­And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk beneath the Tropic sea?  I for one have no rejoinder save—­We have no proofs as yet.

There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans—­colossal monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with aristocracies, priesthoods—­seemingly always of a superior and conquering race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of older conquered races; of imported slaves too, and their descendants.