The next great period in the history of the race—the historic era—is supposed to be entirely within the province of real knowledge. It begins with the history of the Greeks—not the symbolic but the real—that grand and glowing intellectualism which, in many respects, may be said to equal the intellectual development of our own times. The history of Greece and Rome is in truth the history of the race, of the world, of mankind. There were cotemporary nations of great power, extent and cultivation, but the Greeks and Romans, and the subject or servile populations that acknowledged their supremacy, made up the larger portion of the race. It is true the Persians were then pure Caucasians, and, in respect to numbers, largely surpassed the Greeks, but while they did not differ much in their general character, they were on the decline before the Greeks had reached their full national development. The latter always referred to Egypt as the source of their civilization, but it is more probable that they borrowed from Asia most of those things supposed to be of foreign origin. It is, however, quite possible that the earliest civilization was developed in Africa, that it receded from thence to Asia, as we know it afterwards did from the latter to Europe, and as we now witness it, passing to America. But what is civilization? It is, or it may be defined as, the result of intellectual manifestation. A nation or people who have most deeply studied and understood the laws of nature or the nature of things, and applied their knowledge to their own welfare, are the most civilized or we might say, in a word, that the nation that has the most knowledge is the most civilized. The Greeks, certainly, surpassed all cotemporary nations in the most essential of all knowledge, yet even this seems to have been rather a thing of chance than otherwise. Political intelligence, or a knowledge of men’s social relations to each other, is the most vital they can possess. The Greeks may be said both to have possessed this knowledge and to have been entirely deficient in it. Athens, with thirty thousand citizens all recognized as political equals, was a Democracy, but this so-called Democracy, with, perhaps, a hundred thousand slaves, was a burlesque on a democratic government. The Helots of Greece, the servile and subject population of which history gives no account, except to refer to them, were white men—men with all the natural capacities of Socrates, Demosthenes, or Alcibiades, but the Greek orators and writers of the day never even seemed to imagine that they had any rights whatever. They had much the same relation to the Greeks that the Saxons had to the Normans, that the Irish have to the English, and yet with all their political enlightenment and high intellectual development, the Greeks gave them no rights, and treated them as different and subordinate beings. The notion, therefore, taught in our schools, that