eir
cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.

What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older
civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity
to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the
immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the
immense increase in the velocity of the world movement--are all these
to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and
terrible when it comes? We cannot be certain that the answer will be
in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go
down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity
for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we
have the wit and the courage and the honesty.

Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think
that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on
the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has
held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will
not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own
mighty deeds we make them come true. We cannot afford to develop any
one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing
others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency
of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phoenician,
nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert
destruction.

We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are
to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all,
the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life,
the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
children, then the State will topple, will go down, no matter what may
be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be
that power of organization, that power of working in common for a
common end, which the German people have shown in such signal