Honourable badge of civilized states.

Civilized states are ever developing into a more perfect organization, and a more exact and more various operation; they are ever increasing their stock of thoughts and of knowledge: ever creating, comparing, disposing, and improving. Hence, while bodily strength is the token of barbarian power, mental ability is the honourable badge of civilized states. The one is like Ajax, the other like Ulysses; civilized nations are constructive, barbarous are destructive. Civilization spreads by the ways of peace, by moral suasion, by means of literature, the arts, commerce, diplomacy, institutions: and though material power never can be superseded, it is subordinate to the influence of mind.

Barbarians can provide themselves with swift and hardy horses, can sweep over a country, rush on with a shout, use the steel and firebrand, and frighten and overwhelm the weak or cowardly; but in the wars of civilized countries, even the implements of carnage are con- structed by science, and are calculated to lessen or supersede it; and a campaign becomes co-ordinately a tour of savants, or a colonizing expedition, or a political demonstration. When Sesostris swept round the Euxine, he left at least at Colchis on the Phasis the lasting record of Egyptian civilization; and the memorials of the rule of the Pharaohs are still engraved on the rocks of Libya and Arabia.

Asia with the disciples of Aristotle

,Alexander, again, in a later age, crossed from Macedonia to Asia with the disciples of Aristotle in his train. His march was the diffusion of the arts and commerce, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge; the countries he passed through were accurately described, as he proceeded, and the intervals between halt and halt regularly measured. His naval armaments explored nearly the whole distance from Attock on the Upper Indus to the isthmus of Suez: his philosophers noted down the various productions of beasts of the unknown East; and his courtiers were the first to report to the western world the singular institutions of Hindostan.