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duties. You are a heavy and patient set of people, and you seem to like the income-tax collector coming to your doors, and demanding to know how much you earned last year, and all about your private affairs. We would not stand it. We prefer to raise the money we want out of your silks and your velvets and your cotton goods, even if our own people who require such things have to pay a little more for them. They can afford it. As for our workingmen, if they are so badly off as you pretend, how is it that so many of your people are always flocking to us? How is it that they get on so much better in the United States than they do in England?

"Moreover, John Bull, you are running your head against another stone wall in thinking that you will be able to raise all the money you require for your national defences of which, by the bye, you are making a pretty mess, as we shall show you when our new nickel-steel armored cruisers and monitors are ready-by your present fiscal appliances. Either you must find new sources of taxation, or there will be a desperate raid made upon capital and other forms of property. To import duties, or to socialisin, you will inevitably be driven. Look at your Chancellor of the Exchequer and his wild attempts to raise money by new taxes his van-tax, his horse-tax, his wheel-tax, his claret-tax, and other failures of the kind which strew his path. Has he not warned you that when once the revenue from any tax falls off there are no reserves to which he can turn to make good the deficiency? You have been obliged within the last few years to draw upon the Sinking Fund to meet the sum you require for current expenses, and now you are compelled to distribute the expenses you are incurring over a series of years. Remark that at the same time we are paying off our debt hand over hand. You are mortgaging the future; we are laying by immense reserves to meet it.

You are

losing your opportunities; we are carefully husbanding ours. You are mumbling congratulations to yourself over your progress since 1846-look at ours. Moreover, we live in 1890, and are working for the future.

"What you ought to have done long ago was to have brought all your colonies and dependencies into a great alliance with vou, for trade purposes first, for anything

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else afterward upon which you might happen to agree. You would then have been able to defy the world. Your colonies are capable of supplying you with everything that you require, but they wanted time and opportunity to develop their resources. You should have given them an advantage in your markets by means of differential duties. They could not have taken your goods duty free, for they will raise their money chiefly at the custom-houses, as all sensible nations do; but they could have offered you more favorable terms than they allowed to your competitors. The bond between you would have become closer and closer as the years went by. They looked to you with hope and confidence; now they begin to look to us. Newfoundland is crying aloud to us to take her over. When we get Canada you will see what we shall do for it. It will no longer present the strange contrast with us which it now does, and which astounds every traveller who passes through both countries for the first time. You still have the command of enormous capital, and your people are endowed with marvellous energy and pluck. But you cannot fight the world with the antiquated weapons of half a century ago. Why do you not go back to Brown Bess at once? It would be all of a piece with your commercial policy. Do you not see that even during the last four years tariffs every where have been increased against you? And yet you maunder on about the world being converted to Free Trade! What a surprise is in store for you one of these days! Meanwhile, do not rail at others who profit by the chances which you have neglected.

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That is what Americans say. The day will come when the English people will decide that they were right. Perhaps it is almost too late to establish a customs union with our colonies. Five or ten years hence the last hope of doing it will have to be surrendered. It must be sacrificed because "Free Trade" stands all across the path. At present the great body of the nation do not realize or understand the position into which they are being forced. They will comprehend it only too well before they are much older. Canada, as we have seen, is in a cruel strait. She does not wish to show any sign of disloyalty to England, and yet her interests marshal her across the border line which now sep

arates her from the United States. Even now, however, at the eleventh hour it is possible to approach her with a view to the establishment of a tariff, which might afterward be applied to all our colonies alike. If the moderate duties which we were in consequence obliged to levy upon the imports of nations outside that Union brought in a considerable revenue to this country, would that be a disadvantage to us, considering the growth of national expenditure and the "inelasticity" of our

present revenue? These are questions which the working classes are considering with deep attention. They pay no heed whatever to the statisticians and philosophers. They are beginning to think the thing out for themselves, and when the process is completed the results will astound the world. But the governing men of the country are indisposed or afraid to move, and the golden moments are rapidly passing, never to return.-Nineteenth Century.

THE LATEST RESULTS OF ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY.

BY PROFESSOR A. H. SAYCE.

The

A YEAR ago I gave a short account of the startling archæological discoveries which had just been made in Arabia. explorations of Doughty, Euting, Huber, and, above all, Glaser, the inscriptions they bad found, and the historical facts disclosed by the decipherment of the epigraphic material, have thrown a sudden and unexpected flood of light on a continent which has hitherto been darker even than Central Africa. The members of the last Oriental Congress heard with astonishment that a country which had been supposed to be little more than a waste of sand and rock, inhabited by wandering nomads, and first appearing on the page of history in the time of Mohammed, had really been a centre of light and culture in remote ages -a land of active trade and commerce, which once exercised an important influence on the civilized world of the ancient East, and possessed an alphabetic system of writing earlier, it would seem, than that which we know as the Phoenician alphabet.

been time for the special students of Arabian history and epigraphy to criticise the conclusions at which scholars like Professor D. H. Müller, or Dr. Glaser had arrived.*

A year has passed, and we have now had time to take a sober review of the new discoveries, and examine their weak points. In one respect, the history of ancient Arabia which I laid before the readers of the Contemporary Review must be modified. Professor D. H. Müller was too hasty in ascribing an early date to the inscriptions of Lihhyân in Northern Arabia. Instead of belonging to the tenth, or even the seventh, century before our era, it is now evident that they are not earlier than the fall of the Roman Empire. They are strongly influenced by the religious ideas and technical terms of Judaisin, and belong to the period when Jewish colonies and Jewish proselytism were rapidly extending through Arabia. The kingdoin of Lihhyân rose and decayed at no long interval of time before the birth of Mohammed.

I was able to give only a brief outline of On the other hand, further study has the results that had been announced by gone to confirm Dr. Glaser's view of the scholars in the new field of research A great antiquity of the Minæan kingdom, large portion of the inscriptions on which and of the spread of its power from the they were based had not been published, south of Arabia to the frontiers of Egypt and the work promised by Dr. Glaser, on and Palestine. There can be no doubt the ancient geography of Arabia, had not that it preceded the rise of the kingdom appeared. Moreover, there had not yet of Saba, the Sheba of the Old Testainent. There was no room for the contemporaneous existence of the two monarchies; geographically they covered the same area, and the cities of Saba were embedded, as it

*

* Dr. Glaser's large and learned volume on the ancient geography of Arabia has now been published ("Skizze der Geschichte und Geographie Arabiens," vol. ii., Berlin: Weidmann), and contains a wealth of information on subjects like the site of Ophir, or the geographical knowledge of Ptolemy.

* "Skizze der Geschichte Arabiens," Part I. Munich, Straub.

were, within the territory of Ma'in. But the Sabæan cities flourished at the expense of those of Maʼin, and later tradition forgot even the names of the old Minæan

towns.

The kingdom of Saba was already flourishing when Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon ruled over Assyria, in the eighth century B. C. And not only was it flourishing, its power had extended far to the North, where the Assyrian monarchs came into contact with its king. The visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon carries back the foundation of the Sabæan monarchy to a still earlier date. Unless we are to suppose that the visit is the invention of a later writer, we must conclude that nearly ten centuries before the Christian era Saba had already superseded Ma'in, and that the old kingdom, with its trade and culture, its fortified cities and inscribed walls, had already passed away. The fact would explain why it is that classical writers know only of a Minæan people, not of a Minæan kingdom, and that even in the pages of the Old Testament, while references occur to Sheba, only a careful search can detect the name of Ma'in.

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Dr. Glaser has shown that the " kings" of Saba were preceded by the Makârib, or 'high-priests" of Saba. Here, as in other parts of the Semitic world, the priestking was the predecessor of the merely secular king. The State was originally regarded as a theocracy, and it was some time before the priest and the king became separated from one another. We are reminded of the history of Israel, as well as of Jethro, the "priest of Midian. As in Assyria, where there were" highpriests of Assur" before there were

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kings of Assyria," the State was represented by a deity whose name it bore, or who derived his name from the State. Saba, like Assur, must once have been a god.

We are already acquainted with the names of thirty-three Minaan Sovereigns. Three of them have been found by Professor Müller in inscriptions from the neighborhood of Teima, the Tema of the Old Testament, in Northern Arabia, on the road to Damascus and Sinai. Their authority, therefore, was not confined to the original seat of Minaan power in the South, but was felt throughout the length of the Arabian peninsula. The fact is confirmed by an interesting inscription

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copied by Halévy in Southern Arabia, which has been deciphered by Professor Hommel and Dr. Glaser. It tells us that it was engraved by its authors in gratitude for their rescue by Athtar and other deities "from the war which took place between the ruler of the land of the South, and the ruler of the land of the North,' as well as "from the midst of Egypt (Mitsr) in the conflict which took place between Madhi and Egypt," and for their safe restoration to their own city of Qarnu. The authors of the inscription, Ammitsadiq and Sa'd, further state that they lived under the Minæan King, Abi-yada' Yathi', and that they were the two governors of Tsar and Ashur and the further bank of the river."

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Professor Hommel has pointed out that in Ashur we have an explanation of the Asshurim of the Bible, who are called the sons of Dedau (Gen. xxv. 3, 18), while Tsar must be a fortress often mentioned on the Egyptian monuments as guarding the approach to Egypt, on what would now be the Arabian side of the Suez Canal. Madhi Dr. Glaser would identify with Mizzah the grandson of Esau (Gen. xxxvi. 17), but the other references in the inscription are obscure. It proves, however, that the power of the Minæan princes was acknowledged as far as the borders of Egypt, in what Professor Hommel believes to have been the age of the Hyksos; that their authority was recognized in Edom is shown by an inscription in which mention is made of Gaza,

It would thus appear that Palestine, or at all events the tribes immediately surrounding it, were in close contact with a civilized power which had established trade routes from the South, and protected them from the attacks of the nomad Beduin. The part now performed, or supposed to be performed by Turkey, was performed before the days of Solomon by the princes and merchants of Ma'in. A conclusion of unexpected interest follows this discovery. The Minoans were a literary people; they used an alphabetic system of writing, and set up their inscriptions, not only in their Southern homes, but also in their colonies in the North. If their records really mount back to the age now claimed for them—and it is difficult to see where counter-arguments are to come from-they will be far older than the oldest known inscription in Phoenician let

ters. Instead of deriving the Minæan alphabet from the Phoenician, we must derive the Phoenician alphabet from the Minæan, or from one of the Arabian alphabets of which the Minean was the mother; instead of seeking in Phoenicia the primitive home of the alphabets of our modern world, we shall have to look for it in Arabia. Canon Isaac Taylor, in his "History of the Alphabet," had already found himself compelled by palæographic evidence to assign a much earlier date to the alphabet of South Arabia than that which had previously been ascribed to it, and the discoveries of Glaser and Hommel show that he was right.

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As soon as we reverse the problem and assume that the Phoenician alphabet is later instead of earlier than the Minæan, we obtain an explanation of.much that has hitherto been puzzling. The names given to many of the Phoenician letters are at last found to agree with the forms of the latIt is only in the South Arabian alphabets, for instance, that the letter called "the mouth, our P, has the form of a mouth, or that the first letter aleph, an ox," really resembles the head of that animal. Moreover, we can now understand how it is that the South Arabian alphabets possess letters which do not occur in the Phoenician alpbabet, and are not derived from any of the Phoenician characters. The Phoenician language had lost certain sounds which comparative philology has shown belonged to the Semitic Parent-Speech, and which were preserved in the languages of Arabia. That these sounds should have been represented by special symbols in the Arabian alphabets, if the latter had been borrowed from the defective alphabet of Phoenicia, is unintelligible; in such a case the symbols would have been modifications of other symbols already existing in the alphabet, or else the same symbol would have been allowed to express more than one sound. This has actually happened in Hebrew, where the same symbols stand respectively for 'ain and ghain, for s and sh. There can be but one explanation of the fact that the Arabian alphabets denote by independent symbols certain sounds which had been lost in Phoenician pronunciation; the Arabian alphabets are more primitive than the alphabet of Phoenicia. When the latter first comes before us, it is in a comparatively late and convention

alized form, widely removed from the hieratic characters of Egypt, out of which it is commonly supposed to have been developed.

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The discovery of the antiquity of writing among the populations of Arabia cannot fail to influence the views that have been current of late years in regard to the earlier history of the Old Testament. We have hitherto taken it for granted that the tribes. to whom the Israelites were related were illiterate nomads, and that in Midian or Edom the invaders of Palestine would have had no opportunity of making acquaintance with books and written records. fore the time of Samuel and David it has been strenuously maintained that letters were unknown in Israel. But such assumptions must now be considerably modified. The ancient Oriental world, even in Northern Arabia, was a far more literary one than we have been accustomed to imagine; and as for Canaan, the country in which the Israelites settled, fought, and intermarried, we now have evidence that education was carried in it to a surprisingly high point. In the principal cities of Palestine an active literary correspondence was not only carried on, but was maintained by means of a foreign language, and an extremely complicated script. There must have been plenty of schools and teachers, as well as of pupils and books.

The latest revelation that has been furnished to us by the tablets of Telel-Amarna relates to Jerusalem. Among the tablets now in the Museum of Berlin, five have been found which prove, upon examination, to have been letters sent from the King or Governor of Jerusalem to the Egyptian Sovereigns in the century before the exodus. The Governor in question was named Abdi-dhaba, or Ebed-tob, as his name would have been written in Ilebrew. He describes himself as occupying a more independent position than the gorernors of most of the other towns of Palestine. They were merely Egyptian officials; be, on the other hand, though he owned allegiance to the Egyptian nonarch, nevertheless claims to have derived his power from "the oracle of the mighty king.' 99 As one of the letters shows that mighty king" was not the king of Egypt, but a deity, we are irresistibly reminded of Melchizedek the king of Salem, and priest of "the most high God," from

this "

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whom therefore the king derived his Chushan-rishathaim we must see a successor authority. Last spring I had already rec- of the princes whose conquests were proognized the name of Urusalim" or claimed by the oracle on Moriah. It was Jerusalem in one of the Telel-Amarna tab- an anticipation of the career which Balaam lets at Cairo, and one of those which I predicted for "the Star of Jacob." copied in the collection of M. Bouriant tells us what was the local name of the most high God." The tablet is unfortunately broken; but on one side of it we read: "The city of the mountain of Jerusalem, the city of the temple of the god Uras, (whose) name (there is) Marru, the city of the king which adjoins (?) the locality of the men of Keilah." Marru seems to be the same word as the Aramaic marê, "lord;" he was identified with the Babylonian Uras, and his temple stood on "the mountain" which was called Moriah, perhaps in remembrance of the god. Long before the days when Solomon built the temple of Yahveh the spot on which it stood had been the site of a hallowed sanctuary.

Light is also thrown on a statement of the Egyptian historian, Manetho, which it has been the fashion to treat with scant i respect. He tells us that when the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt they built Jerusalem, as a defence-not against the Egyptians, as would naturally be expected-but against "the Assyrians." In the age of Manetho" Assyrians" and "Babylonians" were synonymous terms.

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The tablets at Berlin refer to transac tions which had taken place between Addidhaba and the "Kassi" or Babylonians, and in one of them an oracle of the god of Jerusalem is quoted which declared that, so long as a ship crosses the sea-this (is) the oracle of the mighty king-so long shall the conquests continue of Nahrima and the Babylonians." Since Nahrima is the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament, light is thrown on the account which is given us in the Book of Judges of the eight-years' occupation of Southern Palestine by the king of that country. In

But though it is to the tablets of TelelAmarna that we must look for light upon the history of the Canaan which the tribes of Israel invaded, it is rather from the monumental records of ancient Arabia that we may expect to draw our chiefest illustrations of the inner life and belief of the invading tribes themselves. One of these illustrations has already been indicated by Professor Hommel.* In one of the Arabian inscriptions discovered by Euting we find the word lau'an used in the sense of

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THE DANGERS OF HYPNOTISM.

BY ST. CLAIR THOMSON, M.D.

By the excitement with which the phenomena and apparent results of hypnotism have been accepted in England, it would almost seem as if the hypnotic influence had obtained sway over the scientific minds of the nineteenth century, as it did over the superstitious, ignorant, and neurotic exaltés of the Middle Ages.

To the previous state of ignorance, or unbelief has succeeded one in which everything good, helpful, and wonderful is greedily received and believed. Minds, otherwise rational and calmly investigative, uo not stop to inquire how hypnotism

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