n civilisation. These studies may be reformed;
they may be as they ought, restricted to a smaller number of persons;
but if it is not desired--as of course it cannot be--that in the
future all men be purely technical capacities and merely living
machines to create material riches; if, on the contrary, it is desired
that in every nation the chosen few that govern have a philosophical
consciousness of universal life, no means is better suited to instil
this philosophic consciousness than the study of ancient Rome, its
history, its civilisation, its laws, its politics, its art, and its
religions, exactly because Rome is the completest and most lucid
synthesis of universal life.

Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectual
and moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations that
the Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for the
Latin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from their
ancestors. The young Germans and Englishmen who study Greek and Latin,
who translate Cicero or construe Horace, assimilate the Latin spirit,
are brought ideally and morally nearer to us, are prepared without
knowing it to receive our intellectual and social influence in other
fields, are made in greater or less degree to resemble us. Indeed,
it can be said, that, material interests apart, Rome is still in the
mental field the strongest bond that holds together the most diverse
peoples of Europe; that it unites the French, the English, the
Germans, in an ideal identity which overcomes in part the diversity in
speech, in traditions, in geographical situation, and in history. If
common classical studies did not make kindred spirits of the upper
classes in England, France, and Germany, the Rhine and the Channel
would divide three nations mentally so different as to be impenetrable
each to another.

Therefore the cosmopolitan universality of Roman history is a kind
of common good which the Latin races ought to defend with all
their might, having care that no other history usurp its place in
contemporary culture; that it remain the typical outline, the ideal
model of universal history in the education of coming generations. The
Latin civilised world has need that every now and then an historian
arise to reanimate the history of Rome, in order to maintain its
continued supremacy in the education of the intelligent; to prevent
other histories from usurping this pre-eminence.

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