is sometimes supposed, a high and fine general culture.  What it implies is a strong sense of the necessity of knowing scientifically, as the expression is, the things which have to be known by us; of knowing them systematically, by the regular and right process, and in the only real way.  And this sense the Germans especially have.  Finally, there is the power of social life and manners.  And even the Athenians themselves, perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.

Voltaire, in a famous passage[462] where he extols the age of Louis the Fourteenth and ranks it with the chief epochs in the civilization of our race, has to specify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis the Fourteenth, as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed on us its art and literature, and the Italian Renascence its revival of art and literature.  And Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the gift to name.  It is not the sort of gift which we expect to see named.  The great gift of the age of Louis the Fourteenth to the world, says Voltaire, was this:  l’esprit de societe, the spirit of society, the social spirit.  And another French writer, looking for the good points in the old French nobility, remarks that this at any rate is to be said in their favor:  they established a high and charming ideal of social intercourse and manners, for a nation formed to profit by such an ideal, and which has profited by it ever since.  And in America, perhaps, we see the disadvantages of having social equality before there has been any such high standard of social life and manners formed.

We are not disposed in England, most of us, to attach all this importance to social intercourse and manners.  Yet Burke says:  “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish.”  And the power of social life and manners is truly, as we have seen, one of the great elements in our humanization.  Unless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete.  The impulse for cultivating it is not, indeed, a moral impulse.  It is by no means identical with the moral impulse to help our neighbor and to do him good.  Yet in many ways it works to a like end.  It brings men together, makes them feel the need of one another, be considerate of one another, understand one another.  But, above all things, it is a promoter of equality.  It is by the humanity of their manners that men are made equal.  “A man thinks to show himself my equal,” says Goethe, “by being grob,—­that is to say, coarse and rude; he does not show himself my equal, he shows himself grob.”  But a community having humane manners is a community of equals, and in such a community great social inequalities have really no meaning, while they are at the same time a menace and an embarrassment to perfect ease of social intercourse.  A community with the spirit of society is eminently, therefore, a community with the spirit of equality.  A nation with a genius