When we talk of man’s advance towards his full humanity, we think of an advance, not along one line only, but several.  Certain races and nations, as we know, are on certain lines preeminent and representative.  The Hebrew nation was preeminent on one great line.  “What nation,” it was justly 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 would say.  Even at the present time, then, the Italians are preeminent in feeling the power of beauty.  The power of knowledge, in the same way, is eminently an influence with the Germans.  This by no means implies, as