lead, in what you accomplish.  The heritage of Rome is, for the peoples of America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purely artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the most beneficent influence on your history.  In a certain sense it might be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true heir of Rome; that the new world is nearer—­by apparent paradox—­to ancient Rome than is Europe.  Among the most important facts, however little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should number this:  that the Republic, the human state considered as the common property of all—­the great political creation of ancient Rome—­is reborn here in America, after having died out in Europe.  The Latin seed, lying buried for so many centuries beneath the ruins of the ancient world, like the grains of wheat buried in Egyptian tombs, transported from the other side of the ocean, has sprung up in the land that Columbus discovered.  If there had been no Rome; if Rome had wholly perished in the great barbarian catastrophe; if in the Renaissance there had not been found among the ruins of the ancient world, together with beautiful Greek statues and manuscripts, this great political idea, there would to-day be no Republic in North America.  With the word would probably have perished also the idea and the thing; and there is no assurance that men would have been able so easily and so well to rediscover it by their own effort.

I am a student and not a flatterer.  I therefore confess to you frankly, ending these lectures, that I do not belong to that number of Europeans who most enthusiastically admire things American.  I think that Americans in general, in North America as in South, so readily recognise in themselves a sufficient number of virtues, that we Europeans hardly need help them in the belief, easy and agreeable to all, that they stand first in the world.  Having come from an old society, which has a long historical experience, the most vivid impression made upon me in the two Americas has been just that of entering into a society provided with but meagre historical experience, which therefore easily deludes itself, mistaking for signs of heroic energy and proofs of a finished superiority, the passing advantages of an order chiefly economic, which come from the singular economic condition of the world.  In a word, I do not believe that you are superior to Europe in as many things as you think; but a superiority I do recognise, great and, for me at least, indisputable, in the political institutions with which you govern yourselves.  The Republic, which you have made to live again, here in this new land, is the true political form worthy of a civilised people, because the only one that is rational and plastic; while the monarchy, the form of government yet ruling so many parts of Europe, is a mixture of mysticism and barbarity, which European interests seek in vain to justify with sophistries unworthy the high