her vain efforts to subjugate two little South
African republics than Pericles spent in making Athens the Wonder of the
World. If Chamberlain and Salisbury had been the avatars of Pericles and
Phidias, they would have used the nine hundred millions of dollars
wasted in South Africa, and the services of those three hundred thousand
men, and done in England, aye! or done in South Africa, a work of
harmony and undying beauty such as this tired earth had not seen since
Phidias wrought and Pindar sang.

And another thing, the thirty thousand Englishmen sacrificed to the God
of War, and the ten thousand Boers, dead in a struggle for what they
thought was right, would now nearly all be alive and well, rejoicing in
the contemplation of a harmony unparalleled and unsurpassed.

During the last year the United States has appropriated four hundred
million dollars for war and war-apparatus. Since Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-seven we have expended about three times the sum named for war
and waste. If there had been among us a Pericles who could have used
this vast treasure in irrigating the lands of the West and building
Manual-Training Schools where boys and girls would be taught to do
useful work and make beautiful things, we could have made ancient Greece
pale into forgetfulness beside the beauty we would manifest.

When Pericles came into power there was a union of the Greek States,
formed with intent to stand against Persia, the common foe. A treasure
had been accumulated at Delos by Themistocles, the predecessor of
Pericles, to use in case of emergency.

The ambition of Themistocles was to make Greece commercially supreme.
She must be the one maritime power of the world. All the outlying
islands of the AEgean Sea were pouring their tithes into Athens and Delos
that they might have protection from the threatening hordes of Persia.

Pericles saw that war was not imminent, and under the excuse of
increased safety he got the accumulated treasure moved from Delos to
Athens. The amount of this emergency fund, to us, would be
insignificant--a mere matter of, say, two million dollars. Pericles used
this money, or a portion of it at least, for beautifying Athens, and he
did his wondrous work by maintaining a moderate war-tax in a time of
peace, using the revenue for something better than destruction and
vaunting pride.

But Pericles could not forever hold out against the mob at Athens and
the hordes abroad. He might have held the hord