238 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



themselves by watching wholesale slaughters in their arenas. 

 If the numbers destroyed by the hordes of Attila were not 

 equalled by the numbers which the Eoman armies destined 

 at the conquest of Selucia, and by the numbers of the Jews 

 massacred under Hadrian, it was simply because the occa 

 sions did not permit. The cruelties of Nero, Gallienus, and 

 the rest, may compare with those of Zingis and Timour ; and 

 when we read of Caracalla, that after he had murdered 

 twenty thousand friends of his murdered brother, his soldiers 

 forced the Senate to place him among the gods, we are shown 

 that in the Roman people there was a ferocity not less than 

 that which deifies the most sanguinary chiefs among the worst 

 of savages. Nor did Christianity greatly change matters. 

 Throughout Mediaeval Europe, political offences and religious 

 dissent brought on men carefully-devised agonies equalling if 

 not exceeding any inflicted by the most brutal of barbarians. 

 Startling as the truth seems, it is yet a truth to be recog 

 nized, that increase of humanity does not go on pari passu 

 with civilization ; but that, contrariwise, the earlier stages of 

 civilization necessitate a relative inhumanity. Among tribes 

 of primitive men, it is the more brutal rather than the more 

 kindly who succeed in those conquests which effect the earliest 

 social consolidations; and through many subsequent stages 

 unscrupulous aggression outside of the society and cruel 

 coercion within, are the habitual concomitants of political 

 development. The men of whom the better organized societies 

 have been formed, were at first, and long continued to be, 

 nothing else but the stronger arid more cunning savages ; and 

 even now, when freed from those influences which super 

 ficially modify their behaviour, they prove themselves to be 

 little better. If, on the one hand, we contemplate the utterly 

 uncivilized Wood-Veddahs, who are described as &quot; proverbially 

 truthful and honest,&quot; &quot;gentle and affectionate,&quot; &quot; obeying the 

 slightest intimation of a wish, and very grateful for attention 

 or assistance,&quot; and of whom Pridham remarks &quot; What a 

 lessou in gratitude and delicacy even a Veddah may teach I&quot; 



