sh national spirit is
found in those whose school training had been based on the classics,
just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic
models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of
Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second
Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley
and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all
were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is
the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between
the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different
countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done
during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect
changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent
operative.

It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually
find its way into the schools and universities. Before this change had
been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself.
Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the
principle of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to hold
the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing
so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.

In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little about
matters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in which
their subjects conversed and read. Even the French did not try to touch
the German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could become
a centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Court
of Berlin. All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was the
first deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and the
university into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cult
of the Empire. Since then there is scarcely a government (always except
that of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on the
native and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has not
followed in his path. In particular when the state is founded on the
nation the school is used to develop in the children the full
consciousness of nationality. That institution that was for so long the
home of European unity has become the most useful agent for the
perpetuation and exaggeration of national differences. It is in the
school