What is most remarkable, no one that I have ever read has properly tabulated the rough stone implements in a series.
Now that is what we want. We ought to have some large monograph, properly illustrated, showing in a graduated series such so-called “paleoliths” as are possibly of human handicraft; then others less likely be so, and so on down to the most doubtful. It is of no use to the ordinary educated man to be told by self-styled experts that this or that lumpish thing was (though it doesn’t look it) of human handiwork; he can judge that for himself: and as the expert is all out for making it human if he possibly can, he is to be discounted. What we want is, I say, a monograph giving specimens in a graded series: and then, side by side with these, a full description of the place and conditions where they were found.
When that is done we shall be able to judge for ourselves, and not to accept the priestcraft of the people who call themselves scientists; we shall be able to make some rough judgment on the comparative age of such implements. If evident paleoliths are discovered under a depth of stratified stone (not gravel or earth) which argues some very long period of accumulation, I should conclude that man did make them in some very remote time, to which, perhaps, a minimum limit can be set; but until we have them all graded, and discussed according to their grades, and with proof of the rate of stratification, we are at the mercy of men whose business it is to bring forward as many marvels as possible, as it has been the business of all who in all times desire to cut a figure before the people.
And, again, even if we had (which we have not) a proper analysis of this sort of evidence, there would still remain the unbridged gulf between the barbaric and the civilised man.
It stands to reason that civilisation cannot have been born complete. It must have arisen from simple origins; of what sort were those origins? The only reply so far is silence on the part of the wise, and loud, unsupported affirmation on the part of the popular writer. We have, for instance, no series in sculpture proceeding from the rude to the complete. There is a series from the archaic onwards, but the archaic is the work of a high culture. Nowhere in the world is there, so far, apparent, in any art, a set of vague beginnings gradually becoming more definite. The same is true of writing. You may show, indeed, the development of picture writing in the Valley of the Nile, but no one has yet shown the groping and the tentative origins of the thing—if tentative and groping origins there were. Sergi launched what was merely a guess, quite unconvincing, that certain marks upon Western rough monoliths were the origins of the alphabet; the proof he adduced was quite insignificant. No one would invest five pounds on the strength of it in a prospectus.
The truth is that we do not know where writing came from, nor how it was developed. Nor do we know where building with cut stones and with bricks came from. Nor do we know where any of the origins of civilisation are to be found.
One despairing suggestion has been that its origins are now drowned under the sea. That is as likely a guess as any other. At any rate, we know nothing of the way in which the full life of man took its rise. It may have come catastrophically in a very short period of time; under what influences, through what accidents or guidance, we cannot tell. All humanity remembers dimly a very good state of affairs a very long time ago—and beyond that mere memory and tradition we have nothing to go on.
So much for “prehistory”—I am weary of it and of its now discredited prophets. Speculation is the concealed material of their Mumbo-Jumbo; assertion its ritual. Rather let me consider the known past, and, entering Torbay all alone under so glad a morning, let me consider that other, that real, that known affair, the landing of the Prince of Orange, the Patron of Belfast and of Saint James’s Square and of other things, less suitable to ears polite.
I should like to have seen that big Dutch fleet, with its few English renegades on board, come sweeping into Torbay. I should like to have seen the crowded boats passing to and fro, landing the Dutchmen and other foreign troops, and the great lords who were conspiring against their king, and the saturnine William himself. I should like to have seen that mercenary army of adventurers, hired to give the last blow to so great a victim as the wounded kingship of the English, formed in column, and the march up to Exeter: with the villagers timidly peeping from behind closely shut windows at the strange faces, hearing alien speech, and wondering what the issue of the invasion would be.
There was a fine pageantry about all that miserable business which ended the age-long, but dying, tradition of monarchy in Britain, and put
