firm line drawn as by our greatest jurists of to-day. So much for the construction. In the respective reparation to be made for masters and slaves we find evidence of its broad-minded humanity as well. When in any land has one of the people been valued relatively at so high a rate?

Thus we vision an age in its greatness, from now on, and man once more is plunging into the trough of the waters. Some ground is to be held, some material progress marked, the depths are not quite so deep; but thousands of years are to elapse before a like level is to be again reached and in part surpassed by the Greek in the day of his glory. And confirmation of this tremendous swing back; we now see him emerging as it were from a barbaric past, and it is only now that we begin to credit that in an unknown day before that past there was an art almost to equal and a science to even surpass its greatest achievements.

And in its turn the Greek supremacy is also to pass away. Its days have been but few as we count days; but it has given new canons of beauty to the world, new ideals of perfection to mankind. And then a few short centuries and the noble gentleman of Pericles is the contemptible sycophant we find him when under the sway of the Roman. Masters have to be conciliated can a slave be too abject? And what if we also had been driven to placate a German bully-or die?

And now indeed it is down, down, down, until we are in the depths of our dark ages, probably the lowest. point of retrogression reached by humanity in historical times. Never were man and his works more worthless. Even Christianity itself is perverted by his debased outlook on life. Not least of the mysteries we would understand are these dark days following the decadence of Rome. Had Rome in her domination killed all other life and virility, and, a dead thing herself, left none to fill her place? Would this also have been the result of a Teuton triumph? Rome rotten, decayed-never a world more hopeless than in

these hours of her degradation. And a German tyranny! The same debacle of mankind. Poets have sung the Augustan age as they would the glorious day of the Kaiser; but the one as the other would have been no bridal day of an awakening morn, but the swan song of an expiring civilization. But it was not to be. For some thousand years or more, mankind, having emerged from that dark period has been on the rising flood of tremendous achievement. Centuries are to pass and they are to be centuries of growth and not decline, and the world of to-day is not the world the Roman ground under his heel. The Teuton thought to follow in his steps, and that mankind, a rotten berry, was to be his for the gathering. And he stretched out his hand to take it; but it was a burr of steel he laid hold of, and it pierced him and destroyed him in the day of his greatest pride. In the tremendous days of the war every ally proved himself worthy of the proudest day of his past. The Italian remembered that he was a Roman; the Frenchman would have rejoiced his Napoleon; whilst an Elizabethan would have shaken hands with his children of to-day. And the smaller nations-the Belgian, the Serb, the Roumanian-they have covered themselves with glory. And so it is we have witnessed, still are witnessing, a world mounting on the waters and in this great spirit of the nations is assurance for the immediate days to be.

I know we meet at times of unprecedented social unrest the wide world over-and to us living in the swirl it is perhaps even more discomforting than piping days of peace with a little less glorious spirit; and yet, taking a broad survey, as we are now doing, once more this comforting thought reassures us, that it is this underlying spirit that alone tells over the centuries. Yet at the same time this perplexing reflex thought disquiets-is such unrest evidence that having reached a new point of culmination the spirit of man for the time being, has exhausted itself in its supreme effort, and that from the crest of the wave we are

once more to plunge into the abysm below? It is a fair query. This rhythmic movement of thought, this rise and fall, this ebb and flow, seems the law of life. And we would ask Why? and yet the further "why"-Why our times may not prove exceptional? But the future, can it be other than the past? And we would understand this wave-like to and fro of civilization. In vain. Elusive, it ever escapes our comprehension. The problem is beyond us, so many its complications. So many factors go to make up life its movement is resultant of so many forces. Separately we may analyse them to some extent, but would we tell what each effects in their collective action we utterly fail. Now some forces pull this way, now that; now with, now against, one another; and now a force acting in one direction yesterday will act in the entirely opposite direction to-morrow. One thing only we note with certainty--when all pull together we get results which make history. When forces all tending upwards and onwards all act together we reach a maximum point of advancement; with conditions reversed we fall back to a minimum point of retrogression.

Whilst even to tabulate these forces would be the work of a lifetime, yet we may somewhat more accurately gauge one or two of the more potent of them. Thus, first and foremost is the determination of nature to perpetuate life. This seems a law with no exception -given sustenance, and there pro tanto you will find life. Every living species in the earth, air, or sea, man included, unless most highly educated, will multiply and reproduce to the limit of sustenance alone. And this it is which makes our domestic problems so infinitely difficult to solve. Increase the suitable and requisite sustenance, and infallibly you will increase the corresponding life; limit, or entirely destroy such sustenance, and as surely life to the same extent will become extinct. And given life, and sustenance falling off, and there will be a fierce struggle for it amongst those who would possess it. As regards life and its

perpetuation and preservation, nature has left nothing to chance. Let there be but life and to the last gasp it will fight for existence-a fight for existence which in the past has so entirely moulded the human race. And next, given life, and the most powerful factor in its development is local conditions. The child of the arctic circle and the child of the tropics are almost as far apart in their outlook as the countries which they inhabit. Those of the temperate zone may more approximate in type, but in them also we note a great difference between the people of the hills and the people of the plains. Some would maintain that race characteristics are entirely moulded by such physical conditions. Perhaps in the first stages, but as time passes man as much makes his environment as his environment makes man. Action and reaction is noticeable and beyond contention. Above all, what differentiates between one race and another is energy and the want of it; and above all, energy seems referable to climatic conditions. Let life be easily sustained and energy is painfully non-existent. So it is sapped if life be too hard. On the other hand it is greatest where nature has to be fought and can be fought successfully. But these are but the "a, b, c's" of the subject, and yet nowadays how dangerously we ignore them both. Life will produce to the limit of sustenance, and energy alone makes that life of any value. The trend of modern talk is to flout the one and to sap the other, and yet the story of a nation's greatness has always been the story of its effort. Effort is essential to everything worth having. The muscle never used does not increase with rest, but atrophies, and the bone ceasing to be of service ultimately is found in rudimentary form alone. It is in effort we see the makers of the world. Tried, and they go from one success to another. Life too easy, and they fail to command even a sufficiency. Thus witness many a devastating horde. Magnificent animals we first see them, whatever else. A few generations, energy lost, and they prove more effete than those they have subdued. And their

prosperity is as evanescent. It is rare that wealth acquired by war brings lasting benefit. Their successive conquests with the loot and slaves that followed in their train, undermined the Romans with an insatiable greed that tainted their life to the last page. of her story. Her people became intolerant of the slow reward of honest toil. A hardy peasant clan, and they had virtues the admiration of mankind; but from the day that Scipio dazzled them with the spoils of Carthage--from that day they were a changed race. But it is in sustained effort that its full reward is to be found. Thus contrast Rome with the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians, never very numerous, sought prosperity in industry alone. We rarely see them as conquerors. Ruthless, maybe, to trade rivals, they were essentially fair in their relations with the rest of the world. If they wanted anything they bought itland, for instance, which they paid for. Thus we see Carthage centuries after her foundation still paying rent for the site to the representatives of the original owners. And the result was, wherever the Phoenicians went they were welcome, for they took prosperity with them; and whilst great powers like Persia and Egypt valued them as allies, savages and natives never feared them as neighbours. And we also owe them the greatest of debts, for it was they who gave us the alphabet. And thus we see them persisting in their industrious energy century after century. Tyre in particular, built on an island off the Syrian coast, impregnable in her silver streak, for two thousand three hundred years never knew her temple profaned by foot of foreign invader. And her glory, magnificence, and wealth are told in marvellous verse by no less than the prophet Ezekiel himself. And most amazing fact of all, amazingly rich, her vast wealth never spelt her ruin. But she was no nouveau riche coming into a vast inheritance to dissipate it in profligacy, nor brigand loaded with plunder to fling it away in one mad whirl of pleasure, but her wealth-the still vaster accumulation of successful energy applied to the ser