Egypt was the mould of the Hebrew nation--the matrix in which a single family, or, at most, a small tribe, grew to a people as numerous as the American people at the time of the Declaration of Independence. For four centuries, according to the Hebrew tradition--a period as long as America has been known to Europe--this growing people, coming a patriarchal family from a roving, pastoral life, had been placed under the dominance of a highly developed and ancient civilization--a civilization symbolized by monuments that rival in endurance the everlasting hills; a civilization so ancient that the Pyramids, as we now know, were hoary with centuries ere Abraham looked on them. [Illustration: Moses in the bulrushes.] No matter how clearly the descendants of the kinsmen who came into Egypt at the invitation of the boy-slave become prime minister, maintained the distinction of race, and the traditions of a freer life, they must have been powerfully affected by such a civilization; and just as the Hebrews of to-day are Polish in Poland, German in Germany, and American in the United States, so, but far more clearly and strongly, the Hebrews of the Exodus must have been Egyptian. It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem more natural than that a people, in turning their back upon a land where they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history, the observer of politics, know that nothing is more _un_natural. For "institutions make men." And when amid a people used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that initiative force--the "men who in the beginnings make institutions." This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between Egyptian and Hebrew policy are not of form but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other, to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! from out the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of man.