oundly. But the reaction of
European thought upon this continent, which originally required twenty,
or, for that matter, two hundred or two thousand years to show itself,
now shows itself, in the industrial and commercial field, for instance,
through our banking and Stock Exchanges, in as many hours, or, for that
matter, minutes.

It is difficult, of course, for us to realize the extent to which each
nation owes its civilization to others, how we have all lived by taking
in each other's washing. As Americans, for instance, we have to make a
definite effort properly to realize that our institutions, the sanctity
of our homes and all the other things upon which we pride ourselves, are
the result of anything but the unaided efforts of a generation or two of
Americans, perhaps owing a little to certain of the traditions that we
may have taken from Britain.

One has to stop and uproot impressions that are almost instinctive, to
remember that our forefathers reached these shores by virtue of
knowledge which they owed to the astronomical researches of Egyptians
and Chaldeans, who inspired the astronomers of Greece, who inspired
those of the Renaissance in Italy, Spain, and Germany, keeping alive and
developing not merely the art of measuring space and time, but also that
conception of order in external nature without which the growth of
organized knowledge, which we call science, enabling men to carry on
their exploitation of the world, would have been impossible; that our
very alphabet comes from Rome, who owed it to others; that the
mathematical foundation of our modern mechanical science--without which
neither Newton nor Watt nor Stevenson nor Ericson nor Faraday nor Edison
could have been--is the work of Arabs, strengthened by Greeks, protected
and enlarged by Italians; that our conceptions of political
organization, which have so largely shaped our political science, come
mainly from the Scandinavian colonists of a French province; that
British intellect, to which perhaps we owe the major part of our
political impulses, has been nurtured mainly by Greek philosophy; that
our Anglo-Saxon law is principally Roman, and our religion almost
entirely Asiatic in its origins; that for those things which we deem to
be the most important in our lives, our spiritual and religious
aspirations, we go to a Jewish book interpreted by a Church Roman in
origin, reformed mainly by the efforts of Swiss and German theologians.

And this in