representing sounds chu, fu, u" class="c1" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/> Here the first sign, the sieve, is to be pronounced chu; the second, the horned serpent, fu, and the little bird, again, u. In the more cursive or Hieratic writing the horned serpent appears as ; in the later Demotic as and . The Phœnicians, who borrowed their letters from the Hieratic Egyptian, wrote and . The Greeks, who took their letters from the Phœnicians, wrote . When the Greeks, instead of writing like the Phœnicians from right to left, began to write from left to right, they turned each letter, and as became K, our k, so , vau, became F, the Greek so-called Digamma, the Latin F.

The first letter in Chu-fu, too, still exists in our alphabet, and in the transverse line of our H we must recognize the last remnant of the lines which divide the sieve. The sieve appears in Hieratic as , in Phœnician as , in ancient Greek as , which occurs on an inscription found at Mycenæ and elsewhere as the sign of the spiritus asper, while in Latin it is known to us as the letter H.[10] In the same manner the undulating line of our capital still recalls very strikingly the bent back of the crouching lion, which in the later hieroglyphic inscriptions represents the sound of L.

If thus in our language we are Aryan, in our letters Egyptian, we have only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonian. Why is our hour divided into sixty minutes, our minutes into sixty seconds? Would not a division of the hour into ten, or fifty, or a hundred minutes have been more natural? We have sixty divisions on the dials of our watches simply because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the second century B.C., accepted the Babylonian system of reckoning time, that system being sexagesimal. The Babylonians knew the decimal system, but for practical purposes they counted by sossi and sari, the sossos representing 60, the saros 60 × 60, or 3600. From Hipparchus that system found its way into the works of Ptolemy, about 150 A.D., and thence it was carried down the stream of civilization, finding its last resting-place on the dial-plates of our clocks.

And why are there twenty shillings to our sovereign? Again the real reason lies in Babylon. The Greeks learnt from the Babylonians the art of dividing gold and silver for the purpose of trade. It has been proved that the current gold piece of Western Asia was exactly the sixtieth part of a Babylonian mnâ, or mina. It was nearly equal to our sovereign. The difficult problem of the relative value of gold and silver in a bi-monetary currency had been solved to a certain extent in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom, the proportion between gold and silver being fixed at 1 to 13⅓. The silver shekel current in Babylon was heavier than the gold shekel in the proportion of 13⅓ to 10, and had therefore the value of one-tenth of a gold shekel; and the half silver shekel, called by the Greeks a drachma, was worth one-twentieth of a gold shekel. The drachma, or half silver shekel, may therefore be looked upon as the most ancient type of our own silver shilling in its relation of one-twentieth of our gold sovereign.[11]

I shall mention only one more of the most essential tools of our mental life—namely, our figures, which we call Arabic, because we received them from the Arabs, but which the Arabs called Indian, because they received them from the Indians—in order to show you how this nineteenth century of ours is under the sway of centuries long past and forgotten; how we are what we are, not by ourselves, but by those who came before us, and how the intellectual ground on which we stand is made up of the detritus of thoughts which were first thought, not on these isles nor in Europe, but on the shores of the Oxus, the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus.

Now you may well ask Quorsum hæc omnia?—What has all this to do with freedom and with the free development of individuality? Because a man is born the heir of all the ages, can it be said that he is not free to grow and to expand, and to develop all the faculties of his mind? Are those who came before him, and who left him this goodly inheritance, to be called his enemies? Is that chain of tradition which connects him with the past really a galling fetter, and not rather the leading-strings without which he would never learn to walk straight?

Let us look at the matter more closely. No one would venture to say that every individual should begin life as a young savage, and be left to form his own language, and invent his own letters, numerals, and coins. On the contrary, if we comprehend all this and a great deal more, such as religion, morality, and secular knowledge, under the general name of education, even the most advanced defenders of individualism would hold that no child should enter society without submitting, or rather without being submitted, to education. Most of us would even go further, and make it criminal for parents or even for communities to allow children to grow up uneducated. The excuse of worthless parents that they are at liberty to do with their children as they like, has at last been blown to the winds. I still remember the time when pseudo-Liberals were not ashamed to say that, whatever other nations, such as the Germans, might do, England would never submit to compulsory education. That wicked sophistry, too, has at last been silenced, and among the principal advocates of compulsory education, and of the necessity of curtailing the freedom of savage parents of savage children, have been Mill and his friends, the apostles of