But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood?  You inquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves.  They are usually—­I had almost dared to say, always—­foreigners.  They have crossed the neighbouring mountains.  The have come by sea, like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Belle to America, and they have sometimes forgotten when.  At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer, than the aborigines.  They are to them—­as Jacques Cartier was 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