Let me now, in conclusion, call your attention to another difference between the Occidental and the Oriental mind. When the body is feeble or ill-nourished, it is less liable to resist disease; likewise when the mind is alarmed, cowed, or pinched with fear, it becomes more exposed to superstition. Superstition is the disease of the mind. It will keep away from robust minds, as physical disease from a body in health. Now, the Asiatic mind, scared into silence and subjection,--starved to a mere shadow of what it should be, falls an easy prey to all the maladies that mind is heir to. The European mind, on the other hand, with room and air to move and grow in, develops a vitality which offers resistance to all attacks of mental disease. That explains why superstition thrives with ignorance and slavery, and expires when science and liberty gain the ascendency. Sanitary precautions prevent physical disease; knowledge and liberty constitute the therapeutics of the mind. Why is the Oriental so prone or partial to miracle and mystery? His mind is sick. To believe is easier to him than to reason. He follows the line of the least resistance: he has invented faith that he may not have to think. The mental cells in his brain are so starved, so devitalized, that they have to be whipped into movement. Only the bizarre, the monstrous, the supernatural,--demons, ghosts, dream worlds, miracles and mysteries,--can hold his attention. Not science, but metaphysics, barren speculation,--is the product of the Oriental mind. The philosopher Bacon describes the Asiatic when he speaks of men who "have hitherto dwelt but little, or rather only slightly touched upon experience, whilst they have wasted much time on theories and fictions of the imagination." Again: I sometimes think that if it be true that monotheism, the idea of one God, was first discovered in Asia, it must have been suggested to them by the regime of Absolutism, under which they lived. Unlike Asia, democratic Europe believed in a republic of gods. Polytheism is more consonant with the republican idea, than monotheism. If we would let the American President rule the land without the aid of the two houses of congress or his cabinet ministers, his power would be infinitely more than it is now, but his gain would be the people's loss. His increased power would only represent so much more power taken away from the people. One God means not only more slaves, but more abject, more helpless ones. One God is a centralization which reduces man's liberty to a minimum. With more gods, and gods at times disagreeing among themselves, and all bidding for man's support, man would count for more. The Greeks could not tolerate a Jehovah, or an Allah, before whom the Oriental rabble bent the knee. "Allah knows," exclaims the Moslem; that is why the Mohammedans continue in ignorance. "Allah is great," cries again the Turk. That is why he himself is small. The more powerful the sovereign, the smaller the subject.