rld of modern Europe stands on another. But the history alike of the
great centre itself, and of its satellites on either side, can never
be fully grasped except from a point of view wide enough to take in
the whole group, and to mark the relations of each of its members to
the centre and to one another.'

Now the counsel which our learned historian thus urges upon the
scholar and the leisured student equally represents the point of view
which is proper for the more numerous classes of whom we are thinking
to-night. The scale will have to be reduced; all save the very
broadest aspects of things will have to be left out; none save the
highest ranges and the streams of most copious volume will find a
place in that map. Small as is the scale and many as are its
omissions, yet if a man has intelligently followed the very shortest
course of universal history, it will be the fault of his teacher if he
has not acquired an impressive conception, which will never be
effaced, of the destinies of man upon the earth; of the mighty
confluence of forces working on from age to age, which have their
meeting in every one of us here to-night; of the order in which each
state of society has followed its foregoer, according to great and
changeless laws 'embracing all things and all times;' of the thousand
faithful hands that have one after another, each in their several
degrees, orders, and capacities, trimmed the silver lamp of knowledge
and kept its sacred flame bright from generation to generation and age
to age, now in one land and now in another, from its early spark among
far-off dim Chaldeans down to Goethe and Faraday and Darwin and all
the other good workers of our own day.

The shortest course of universal history will let him see how he owes
to the Greek civilisation, on the shores of the Mediterranean two
thousand years back, a debt extending from the architectural forms, of
this very Town Hall to some of the most systematic operations of his
own mind; will let him see the forum of Rome, its roads and its
gates--

What conflux issuing forth or entering in,
Praetors, Proconsuls to their provinces
Hasting or on return, in robes of state--

all busily welding an empire together in a marvellous framework of
citizenship, manners, and laws, that laid assured foundations for a
still higher civilisation that was to come after. He will learn how
when the Roman Empire declined, then at Damascus and Bagdad and
Seville the Maho