ly asked by their lawgiver, "hath statutes and judgments so
righteous as the law which I set before you this day? Keep therefore and
do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of
the nations which shall hear all these statutes and say: Surely this
great nation is a wise and understanding people!" The Hellenic race was
preeminent on other lines. Isocrates[460] could say of Athens: "Our city
has left the rest of the world so far behind in philosophy and
eloquence, that those educated by Athens have become the teachers of the
rest of mankind; and so well has she done her part, that the name of
Greeks seems no longer to stand for a race but to stand for intelligence
itself, and they who share in our culture are called Greeks even before
those who are merely of our own blood." The power of intellect and
science, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners,--
these are what Greece so felt, and fixed, and may stand for. They are
great elements in our humanization. The power of conduct is another
great element; and this was so felt and fixed by Israel that we can
never with justice refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all his
shortcomings, to stand for it.

So you see that in being humanized we have to move along several lines,
and that on certain lines certain nations find their strength and take a
lead. We may elucidate the thing yet further. Nations now existing may
be said to feel or to have felt the power of this or that element in our
humanization so signally that they are characterized by it. No one who
knows this country would deny that it is characterized, in a remarkable
degree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our feeling for religion is
one part of this; our industry is another. What foreigners so much
remark in us--our public spirit, our love, amidst all our liberty, for
public order and for stability--are parts of it too. Then the power of
beauty was so felt by the Italians that their art revived, as we know,
the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit
of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of
the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but
whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass
judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,--"_e
brutto_," "_e bello_,"--would find that their judgment agreed admirably,
in general, with just what the most cultivated people w