Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling. And, indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old proverb, and its defining verb ‘make,’ and tried to show how some person or persons—let them be who they may—men, angels, or gods—made the sow’s ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage—they might have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, that the sow’s ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who have studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing and failing around them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that which pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the old Stoics—ἐπέχω—I withhold my judgment. I know nothing about the matter yet; and you, O my imaginative, though learned friends, know I suspect very little either. Eldest of things, Divine Equality: so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For, if, as I believe, the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have been among their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has been known on earth during historic times. But that equality was at best, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child. Divine—therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation, even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as I trust, not in vain. The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality, but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very means which it uses to keep itself alive. ‘There were giants in the earth in those days, And Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the earth’— A mighty hunter; and his game was man. No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mists of bygone ages.