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drick is free from the miserable dog-
matism that disgraces most people with
an attitude like that; if he claims to
see little, he does not spend his strength
in bludgeoning those who see more.
And he gives something we may be
very grateful for: namely, every clas-
sical reference to the Druids in full;
so that here the student has before
him all the extant evidence as to the
way the Greco-Roman world regarded
these people. It is interestingly self-
contradictory. What succeeding gene-
rations have mostly noticed in it is
what is said about human sacrifice; so
that the average modern, when he hears
Druids mentioned, thinks at once of
huge wicker cages packed with human
beings soaked in gasoline. But after
careful notice of all these references,
one feels that the average Roman, on
the contrary, when he heard the Druids
mentioned, reacted rather in this way:
"Ah - they are the folk who believe
that the soul is immortal!"
Julius Caesar is the only one who is
quite certainly responsible for the hu-
man sacrifice story;* and there are
reasons for doubting his testimony. In
the 1924 edition of Ploetz's Manual of
Universal History, into which nothing
enters but what has become orthodox
knowledge, we read of the Gauls that
"long before Caesar's time they had
*Some think Poseidonius of Marseilles may
have told human sacrifice stories against the
Druids before Caesar's time; but we have
no direct evidence that he did. And if so,
Marseilles was a Greek colony in the midst
of hostile Gauls; and the Greeks were also
whole-hearted liars about their enemies.
THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH
developed a high civilization, in many
ways more advanced than that of the
Romans"; and that "Caesar grossly
understated the degree of their cultu-
ral development"; and we remember
Asinius Pollio's opinion as to his care-
lessness and inaccuracy. I never can
think of those wicker cages without re-
membering certain committees that sat
in several European capitals recently,
whose whole business was to invent
lies about enemy nations . . . and the
vats that came out of their imagina-
tion, in which corpses were said to have
been boiled down for their fat. We are
no worse than the Romans, really;
they could lie as well as we; they under-
stood the value of Propaganda. Re-
member that high-souled Carthaginian
they never mentioned but as "perfidus
Hannibal!" Caesar for his ambition's
sake had attacked and conquered Gaul,
with its civilization "in some respects
more advanced" than his own; and had
caused the death of from three to five
million of its inhabitants; he had taken
their hero-king Vercingetorix to Rome
and butchered him in cold blood there:
a series of actions without a shadow of
ethical excuse: - had he no tempta-
tion to lie against his victims to justify
himself before Rome and posterity?
M. Salomon Reinach, in a recent
letter to The Times Literary Supple-
ment of London, points out that
Caesar, detailing day by day in De
Bello Gallico the events of the war and
all that came under his notice, never
states that he saw or came upon hu-
man sacrifices, as he certainly would
have done if he had had the chance;