ADDKESS ON ANTHKOPOLOGY. 905 



Mr. Hughes, as the passage of Homer just alluded to, and cha- 

 racterised by him ' as the most touching thing in Homer, perhaps 

 in all profane poetry put together'? What answer can be made 

 to all this by those who maintain that the old times were not 

 better than these, who maintain the doctrine of Progress, and hold 

 that man has been gradually improving from the earliest times, and 

 may be expected to go on thus advancing in the future? An 

 answer based upon the employment of simple scientific method, 

 and upon the observance of a very simple scientific rule — upon, to 

 wit, the simple method of taking averages, and the simple rule of 

 enumerating all the circumstances of the case. Noble actions, when 

 we come to count them up, were not, after all, so very common in 

 the olden times ; and side by side with them there existed, and 

 indeed flourished, intertwined with them, practices which the 

 moral sense of all civilised nations has now definitely repudiated. 

 It is a disagreeable task, that of learning the whole truth ; but it 

 is unfair to draw dark conclusions as to the future, based on 

 evidence drawn from an exclusive contemplation of the bright side 

 of the past. A French work, published only last year, was recom- 

 mended to me recently by an eminent scholar as containing a good 

 account of the intellectual and moral condition of the Romans 

 under the Empire. I have the book, but have not been able to 

 find in it any mention of the gladiatorial shows, though one 

 might have thought the words Panem et Circenses might have 

 suggested that those exhibitions entered as factors of some import- 

 ance into the formation of the Roman character. It is impossible 

 to go beyond that in the way of looking only at the bright side of 

 things. Still we ourselves have less difficulty in recollecting that 

 there were 300 Spartans sacrificed to the law-abiding instincts of 

 their race at Thermopylae, than in producing, when asked for 

 them, the numbers of Helots whom Spartan policy massacred in 

 cold blood not so many years after, or those of the Melians and 

 Mitylenaeans whom the polished and cultivated Athenians butchered 

 in the same way, and about the same time, with as little or far less 

 justification for doing so. Homer, whom I have quoted above, 

 lived, it is true, some centuries earlier, but living even then he 

 might have spared more than the five words contained in a single 

 line (176 of Iliad xxiii.) to express reprobation for the slaughter of 

 the twelve Trojan youths at the pyre of Patroclus. The Romans 



