wind and sun, a little lumpy from the attentions of mosquitoes, black flies and other members of the insect family, have existed in Europe for a quarter of a million years, I shall be quite happy though I think they have really been there much longer. As a European family, we have hardly changed in bodily structure for hundreds of thousands of years. I have myself found the skeleton of a girl of a remote antiquity whose hands and feet and ankles must have been as delicate and neat, whose face must have been as fair and oval as the neatest hands and feet and ankles and fair faces of today. And before those obvious blood relations of ours lived in Europe there were for hundreds of thousands of years tougher, rougher folk living there, with fine big brains and great artistic skill, who saw ice ages come and go and who, though they did not know it, saw the dawn of what geologists call the Pleistocene Period; they probably saw also the older Pliocene run its course, but that is not so certain. At the moment I wish merely to remind you that we humans have been at this business of living for a long time. If you will agree not to disagree with me when I say for a million years, I shall not press for any part of the other million and a half which some authorities might be persuaded to give me.

Let us agree then that our family tree is a million years long. perhaps I should say high, and here we are, you and I, grouped with some sixteen hundred million other human beings now alive, as the choice blossoms produced by all the efforts, all the struggles of the ages. I know no thought, not even the thought of God, more awe inspiring than that of this endless line of human ancestors who lived and loved, struggled and died. I am sure that in the main they were remarkably good fellows. There must be an immeasurable ocean of love and kindness, friendship and social service behind us. One would almost have thought that as a race we had been long enough here to have experienced all possible social arrangements and to have solved all problems of government and community life, and yet we know we have not. On the contrary we seem to have, at this moment, about as bad a mess in the making as any that our race has known. Why is it that, in spite of all its striving after good, the human race is still liable to seizure by paroxysms of hate and slaughter-lust like that which has just swept the world or like that which swept your country nearly sixty years ago?

Evidently there is at least one fundamental problem of human life concerning which we and our ancestors have equally failed to reach an agreed solution. Let me attempt to state what I believe that basal problem to be.

It is easy enough, I imagine, for one of the lower animals to live, to have a mate, to produce young, and to go the way of all flesh blindly believing, if there be any belief on the subject at all, that the numbers of the young will fully balance all casualties. But it is very difficult for a human animal that is physically not very strong, with a rather delicate mate who carries her babies. long in pregnancy, with offspring of few certain instincts and a long period of infantile helplessness, with above all a highly organized brain that is apt to get puzzled over the most difficult questions of right and wrong-it is very difficult for such an animal to adjust itself to an environment which in addition to what we may call the natural elements, the climate, the nature of the soil, or whatever it may be, includes also millions, nay, hundreds of millions, of equally puzzled, equally frightened human animals. As we unroll the scroll of history we see effort after effort made by men and communities of men to secure some reasonable adjustment between themselves and their environment, but man is so weak physically, and woman through her reproductive functions so much weaker, and human babies with their long infancy and slow maturity so much the weakest, that it is essential for human beings if they are to survive and prosper to live in some sort of community. Naturally every pair, man and woman, is fearful lest their children perish, so if by chance they find themselves alone they make use in haste of the first community organization they can devise or discover which will work somehow. At once the great problem arises-the problem which has baffled man throughout the millenniums and baffles us still.

It is the problem of Community Discipline with all that that implies, which is of course the sole justification for the existence of government. In the simplest community unit-the familythe father is obviously the disciplinarian and if any should question his right the palm of the paternal hand, or in more extreme cases the paternal club, has throughout the ages, until almost yesterday, provided the full, sufficient title. But man is mortal, and the grey hairs of the patriarch ultimately come with or with

out sorrow to the grave and his authority has to pass to some individual whose position is less securely founded. Then the family must either split into its component groups or in some mysterious way the patriarchal authority must pass without loss of majesty. I would weary you if I were to attempt to elaborate this part of my theme, but it is obvious, man's mind being what it is, that in time the patriarch must almost invariably become a sort of god in spiritual communism with his earthly representative. Thus arises tribal organization and if we wish to label it we must apply to this form of government the title Primitive Theocracy. Obviously in such a community no written laws are necessary; the tribal Father in heaven continues in theory to hand out through his earthly representative arbitrary edicts which come gradually to be tempered by custom and usage. Also obviously the bond which unites the tribe is an extended family tie, the chief being the head of the house in place of the patriarch. History shows that such a type of community organization is incompatible with a national life. Clans may unite in support of some vague idea of nationality, but their union is always temporary and usually short lived because each, being commanded by an absolute chief, must pursue his real or fancied wishes and interests.

Asia, in a manner we shall see in a moment, developed from the tribal organization the fully fledged Theocratic states such as Japan and China were. We know best the process of evolution of this typically Asiatic institution in the case of the Jews. In the Book of Judges we get a picture of the tribes of Israel vaguely conscious of some national unity because of their descent from Abraham, but fighting nevertheless with one another and subject because of their weakness and lack of union to periodic conquest by Philistines and Amalakites. Finally external pressure forced them to unite and Saul the Benjaminite became King of Israel— frankly and avowedly the representative on earth of the God of Israel in heaven. The theory was that Saul had to be obeyed because God spoke through him-rebellion against the king was as the sin of witchcraft, deliberate service of God's enemy the Devil. If the king tried to follow his own path and to give effect to his own ideas, God simply removed His guidance and inspiration and the king got into trouble, and the fact that he was in trouble was of course evidence that God was no longer

with him. This happened to Saul, who was driven to make a pilgrimage to Endor to see if he could get inspiration from the Devil. The interesting thing is that he knew that he could not carry on as ruler without direct guidance and detailed inspiration from the spirit world.

Among people of strong religious feeling, such as the Asiatics, any number of tribes could be and have been united like the tribes of Israel under one ruler who was recognized as the instrument and mouthpiece of divine authority. A natural and obvious extension of this line of reasoning leads to this thought-" God gives earthly power to His instruments, therefore conquerors are sent by God"; in other words "Might is Right because it is divine." Do not let me be misunderstood. The Theocratic state compounded by conquest could not and cannot be held together by force to suppose that one man could forcefully control millions is absurd. The Theocratic state may be and in history usually has been made by force but it is held together by the belief that the ruler, the conqueror, is the mouthpiece of God. God picked him to be ruler, therefore the person of the king is sacred, he is anointed with sacred oil, the king can do no wrong. Obviously to those whose minds work this way a son of a king is not common clay-he is nearer the god-head, perhaps some drops of the sacred oil have fallen on him, he is a prince. At once you have an aristocratic caste in the making.

If one thinks for a moment, a society of the kind we have been considering must be static-the laws are the word of God and therefore, as the Medes and Persians clearly saw, they cannot reasonably be altered. It is, I am sure, also clear that the king in such a state was the only possible reformer. If anyone else wanted to make a change he was simply a rebel against God, and kings whose lives were spent in pleasant places-think of King Solomon's unprecedented comforts were little likely to lead revolutions. In a theocracy things have to be corrupt beyond corruption before the impiety of revolution can be faced, and long before that the sword of the conqueror has probably demonstrated conclusively that the face of the Lord has been turned away and that His hand is stretched out in anger against His people or their rulers. Read the history of India or China or any Asiatic country and watch the repeated conquests.

It is essential to grasp this Asiatic idea of the heaven-ruled state if we are to understand the ills of today, because it is the type of all autocracies that have been, and the hallmark by which you may recognize an autocracy is the idea that common men are made for the law-an idea not unknown among lawyers in democratic countries but clearly Theocratic in origin, and, as we shall see, violently opposed to the Democratic ideal. Another sure sign of an autocratic tendency in social organization is to find that some men are above the law., Clearly in a theocracy the Godinspired law giver is above it. His sons and his wives have similar privileges, for the same sort of reason that the diplomatic privileges of an ambassador are extended to his secretaries and attachés. Obviously too the friends of one of these mouthpieces of the tribal and national gods of Asia will get the same consideration and anyhow the ruler only has to say they are to and they do.

Fortunately for the world, long after Asia was sunk in Theocratic civilization, Europe was uncivilized and still struggling with a clan system. Fortunately too a race of men, the Nordic, was developing there who were less easily swept into adoration of the earthly manifestations of the divine and who had sufficient humor to see that to be a god's mouthpiece was good business for the mouthpiece, and they struck the brilliant idea that they were all more or less mouthpieces of their god and, anyhow, if not perfect mouthpieces, at least as near perfection as any of their neighbors. We call the theory of government which some of these people have elaborated the theory of democracy, and history shows that the real working-out of the theory was done by the Nordic peoples who had got into the southern part of Britain—the English in short-who had particular and peculiar advantages. To begin with, they were in an island. To go on with, they never got entangled in that monstrous sham and fake the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire finally epitomized by saying it was certainly mighty but it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor yet an Empire, only a fraud.

But do not let us forget that it was the fact that England was separated from Europe by water in days of uncertain navigation that alone prevented the Asiatic Theocratic idea, slightly but not much modified, from sweeping all over Europe. Even in England the Democratic ideal almost perished, and some of your ancestors.