its ideal was
within the attainment of but a fraction of the population. The slaves
had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in
the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens.
The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in
order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty
ideals. And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind
were classed as "barbarians," to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying
his ideals.

Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal
System a different type of society. A vast hierarchy in Church and
State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many
gradations to the serf at the bottom. It was an improvement on the
little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and
bound them together with common faith and standards. It prized not the
civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience,
honor, chivalry. Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good
knight without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is
manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to
the soil, and the trader--often the despised Jew confined to the
Ghetto--had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the
Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than
converted.

Under the revival of classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new
emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the
rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of
kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the
Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed,
and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are
initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. As its _beau ideal_ it
substitutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man. It
sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable
circumstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were
accessible to practically every white inhabitant. The Comte de Segur,
one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of
Independence, wrote: "An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and
the airs of our young men of fashion--who has compared the luxury of our
upper classes with the coarse dress of our