Civilization is not communicable to all; many savage tribes are incapable of it.  There are two great divisions of mankind, the civilized and the savage; and, as we shall show, every civilized race in the world has had something of civilization from the earliest ages; and as “all roads lead to Rome,” so all the converging lines of civilization lead to Atlantis.  The abyss between the civilized man and the savage is simply incalculable; it represents not alone a difference in arts and methods of life, but in the mental constitution, the instincts, and the predispositions of the soul.  The child of the civilized races in his sports manufactures water-wheels, wagons, and houses of cobs; the savage boy amuses himself with bows and arrows:  the one belongs to a building and creating race; the other to a wild, hunting stock.  This abyss between savagery and civilization has never been passed by any nation through its own original force, and without external influences, during the Historic Period; those who were savages at the dawn of history are savages still; barbarian slaves may have been taught something of the arts of their masters, and conquered races have shared some of the advantages possessed by their conquerors; but we will seek in vain for any example of a savage people developing civilization of and among themselves.  I may be reminded of the Gauls, Goths, and Britons; but these were not savages, they possessed written languages, poetry, oratory, and history; they were controlled by religious ideas; they believed in God and the immortality of the soul, and in a state of rewards and punishments after death.  Wherever the Romans came in contact with Gauls, or Britons, or German tribes, they found them armed with weapons of iron.  The Scots, according to Tacitus, used chariots and iron swords in the battle of the Grampians—­“enormes gladii sine mucrone.”  The Celts of Gaul are stated by Diodorus Siculus to have used iron-headed spears and coats-of-mail, and the Gauls who encountered the Roman arms in B.C. 222 were armed with soft iron swords, as well as at the time when Caesar conquered their country.  Among the Gauls men would lend money to be repaid in the next world, and, we need not add, that no Christian people has yet reached that sublime height of faith; they cultivated the ground, built houses and walled towns, wove cloth, and employed wheeled vehicles; they possessed nearly all the cereals and domestic animals we have, and they wrought in iron, bronze, and steel.  The Gauls had even invented a machine on wheels to cut their grain, thus anticipating our reapers and mowers by two thousand years.  The difference between the civilization of the Romans under Julius Caesar and the Gauls under Vercingetorix was a difference in degree and not in kind.  The Roman civilization was simply a development and perfection of the civilization possessed by all the European populations; it was drawn from the common fountain of Atlantis.