The story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the characters are alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the most exact sense.

And yet, for all its actuality and the part played in it by mails and telegraphs and iron war-ships, the ideas and the manners of the native actors date back before the Roman Empire.

They are Christians, church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the Roman wall.

We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of the patriarchal.

We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in a period of communism.