And often, when I mix with the crowds in the streets, or at the theatre, or in public assemblies, I feel that I am in the presence of the haunted past, and the whole human story unfolds itself to my mind: the primeval savage with "his fell of hair," fighting with other savages, under "branching elm, star-proof"; the Ethiopian warrior in his battle chariot; the bent slave, toiling on the pyramid; the armed knight errant, foraying, and redressing sentimental wrongs; the fearless Viking, crossing oceans in his open galley, to discover continents; the gladiator in the Roman arena; the Greek Stoics, discoursing at the fountain; Drake singeing the King of Spain's beard; St. Francis preaching to the birds; the Buddha, giving his body to the famished tigress; the Aryan at the plough, the Phoenician in his bark, the Californian seeking gold, the whaler amongst the ice, the ancient Briton in his woad--all the mysterious and fascinating human drama of love and hate, of hunger and riches, and laughter and tears, and songs and sobbings, and dancing and drunkenness, and marriage and battle, and heroism and cowardice, and murder and robbery, and the quest of God. That wonderful human mystery-play, how softly it touches us, how deeply it moves us, with its hum of myriad voices, its vision of white arms, and flashing weapons, and beckoning fingers, and asking looks, and the ripple of its laughter, like the music of hidden streams in leafy woods, and the lisp of its unnumbered feet, and the weird rhythm of its war songs, and the pathos of its joy-bells, and the pity of its follies, and its failures, and its crimes--the pity; "the pity of it, the pity of it." Possessed, then by this dreaming habit, this Janus-like bent of mind, I cannot think of the Bottom Dog apart from the whole bloodstained, tearstained tragedy of man's inhumanity to man. For the Bottom Dog is a child of all the ages, he plays his part in a drama whereof the scene is laid in the Milky Way. He recalls to us the long wavering war between darkness and light, the life and death struggle of the brute to be a man, the painful never-ceasing effort of man to understand. We cannot look back over that trampled and sanguinary field of history without a shudder; but we must look. It reaches back into the impenetrable mists of time, it reaches forward to our own thresholds, which still are wet with blood and tears, and on every rood of it, in ghastly horror, are heaped the corpses of the men, and women, and children slain by the righteous, in the name of justice, and in the name of God. Though the gods perished, though the vane of justice veered until right became wrong, and wrong right, yet the crimes continued, the horrible mistakes were repeated; the holy, and the noble, and cultivated still cried for their brother's blood, still trampled the infants under their holy feet, still forced the maidens and the mothers to slavery and shame. Men and women, is it not true?