“So that this paltry thirty thousand to forty thousand is the very most which the twelve tribes could, and only for these few years, bring to the front. In general, the tribes warred with one another and with their neighbors, so that, for the purposes of foreign war, the Jewish race represented only two or three tribes at a time, or, say, ten thousand able men. Thus one tribe—as, for example, Judah—would have only from three thousand to four thousand men in all, supposing every man left his fields and home to fight, while Assyrian armies not unusually numbered one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand men.” In the above statistics also we have taken a greater area than I think the tribes occupied. There is not a sign of a Jewish people till about what is called their “Eastern Captivity,” and the Rev. Mr. Rodwell writes in the _Trans. of the Biblical Archaeological Society_ that “_the Hebrew of the Bible is no other than a dialectic variety of the Canaanitish or Phœnician tongue expressed in the Chaldean character_, not brought, as has been taught, by Abram himself from Ur of the Chaldees, but adopted by the Israelites during their long captivities.” “Could it possibly be otherwise when we look at the facts? The Jews were a poor, ignorant, weak Arab tribe, living on the outskirts of a land occupied for long ages previously by the most famous race of all antiquity—a people from whom Greece, Rome, and Carthage alike borrowed the ideas of their earliest art and architecture. Homer called this race _Phens_ Poludaidaloi—‘artists of varied skill,’ and later Romans prized them above all others for their constructive talent. Pliny, Seneca, and Varro praise them in words which will never die; Jews said that David solicited their skilled labor, and that Solomon’s temple, small and simple though it was, could not be raised without their help; nay, though Ezra says he had these ensamples before him, and had seen all the fine buildings of Babylon, yet he too had to solicit their aid, else the walls of the city of Jehovah and Zerub-babel’s second shrine could never have been constructed. In all arts, trades, and manufactures this extraordinary people excelled every ancient race, and from the very earliest times down and into the Roman period. Is it surprising, then, that their language and customs prevailed wherever their skilled aid was required? that Africa in its writing was no less Punic—that is, Phœnician—than Libyan, guided by these wondrous Pheni or “Tyrii bilingues”? The history of Britain during some past generations as the first great manufacturing country of modern times shows how civilization, power, and progress must ever follow industry and usefulness, and Phœnicians to a great extent in early days controlled ‘the sinews of war’ where this was their interest; but it too often proved more profitable to deal in swords and helmets than in ‘Tyrian purple’ and costly brocade stuffs. Manufacturers are not much given to