d a
primer with an etymological dictionary at his side. Germans are
renowned writers of commentaries, but you cannot deal with men and
with life by the aid of commentaries. Exegesis solves no international
quarrels, and the mastery of men is not gained with dictionaries and
grammars.

We are all prone to forget the end in the means, for the end is far
away and the means right under our noses. We all recognize, when we
are pulled up short and made to think, that, after all, the arts and
letters, religion and philosophy and statecraft, are for one ultimate
purpose, which is to develop the complete man. Everything must be
measured by its man-making power. Ideas that do not grow men are
sterile seed. Men who do not move other men to action and to growth
are not to be excused because they stir men to the merely pleasant
tickling of thinking lazily and feeling softly. Thus Lincoln was a
greater man than Emerson; Bismarck a greater than Lessing; Cromwell a
greater than Bunyan; Napoleon a greater than Corneille and Racine;
Pericles greater than Plato; and Caesar greater than Virgil.

The man who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his
thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the
potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil,
as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories
into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or
bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile
as though they were female, and gave birth, to living things. Their
thinking is a form of action. The real test of successful organization
is the thoroughness of the thinking behind it; on the other hand, the
only test of thinking is the success of the thought in actual
execution, and the Germans often take this too much for granted. We
really know and hold as an inalienable intellectual possession only
what we have gained by our own effort, and with a certain degree of
actual exertion. People who have never worked out their own salvation
always join, at last, that large class in the body politic who don't
know what they want, and who will never be happy till they get it.

When it comes to dealing with inanimate things, books of rules are
invaluable. Hence, in chemistry, physics, archaeology, philology,
exegesis, the Germans have forged ahead; their intellectual street-cleaning
is unsurpassed; but the ship of state needs not only men to
t