Accordingly, we find that the discovery was familiar in the remotest of recorded times. The wearing of helmets is a fashion as ancient as civilisation itself. The Rig-Veda Aryans had helmets, and the Homeric Greeks, and in the ancient classical Odes (iv, 2, 4, 5) a Chinese poet, perhaps coeval with Homer, tells of a potentate:
“He’s thirty thousand men afoot,
Who handsome helmets wear,
With shells and bright vermilion strings
That flutter in the air,”
[135] ]thus anticipating the “red coats” of England. Indeed, that is not the only coincidence of old and new. The Homeric chiefs went among their men, in times of confusion, striking right and left with effective, home-made sceptres of wood, like modern policemen with their truncheons. The helmets of the police make the likeness almost palpable.
In the House of Commons a touching medieval survival is the wearing of hats. It comes down from the days when the steel-cap clapped on the head was the first step in a breach of the peace, and the head uncovered was the silent, unmistakable symbol of the peace-making speech, the soft words to turn away wrath. Little as he thinks of it, the member, who takes off his hat and stands up to speak, is led by a beautiful old custom to assume an attitude such as Themistocles has been admired for expressing, when violence was offered him in council, and he said, “Strike, but hear me.” Meanwhile, upon the table lies the unwieldy metal bauble, meant to represent the mace or loaded stick of the Speaker, who presides and makes no speech, but silently tables his tool as if intimating, “My voice keeps order and my club gives law.”
Every other mace as well as his, and every sceptre and staff of office, is merely a sophisticated emblem of the original reality, which is a common [136] ]stick. The weapons of ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans are ancient indeed compared to anything in Europe; but they are modern things, as of yesterday, compared to the cudgel from the woods. And what is perhaps the most remarkable fact of all, while fashions change in war-tackle as in ladies’ dresses, the primitive cudgel abides the same; and under primitive conditions it is wielded to-day by the hands of contemporary men, exactly as it was wielded by our forefathers, who preceded history so far that, in our books, we speak of them as “missing.” We mean no harm, and we shall, all of us, be missing some day. So there has always appeared to me to be an antiquarian interest in what is certainly, for other reasons too, the best leopard story I know.
In 1886 a Burman farmer was working in his fields, about twenty miles from Thayetmyo, in Lower Burma, and noticed a leopard seize and carry away a calf. He picked up a stick and ran after it, shouting and waving the stick. The leopard saw him and paused and looked at him; but did not drop its prey, as the man had hoped. He fingered the stick in his hands, not taking his eyes off the enemy, and felt, to his joy, that it was a “male bamboo,” a bamboo solid inside, a very strong and formidable cudgel, light enough to [137] ]handle quickly and heavy enough to kill a man or stun an ox.
They continued to eye each other askance, he and the leopard. He would have been happy to see it drop the veal and go. It would have been well content to depart without hurting him. But to go away supperless was not its intention, and to let it take away his calf was not his.