and enlarged by Italians; that our conceptions of political organization, which have so largely shaped our political science, come mainly from the Scandinavian colonists of a French province; that British intellect, to which perhaps we owe the major part of our political impulses, has been nurtured mainly by Greek philosophy; that our Anglo-Saxon law is principally Roman, and our religion almost entirely Asiatic in its origins; that for those things which we deem to be the most important in our lives, our spiritual and religious aspirations, we go to a Jewish book interpreted by a Church Roman in origin, reformed mainly by the efforts of Swiss and German theologians.

And this interaction of the respective elements of the various nations, the influence of foreigners, in other words, and of foreign ideas, is going to be far more powerful in the future than it has been in the past.  Morally, as well as materially, we are a part of Europe.  The influence which one group exercises on another need not operate through political means at all; indeed, the strongest influences are non-political.

American life and civilization may be transformed by European developments, though the Governments of Europe may leave us severely alone.  Luther and Calvin had certainly a greater effect in England than Louis XIV. or Napoleon.  Gutenberg created in Europe a revolution more powerful than all the military revolutions of the last ten centuries.  Greece and Palestine did not transform the world by their political power.  Yet these simple and outstanding truths are persistently ignored by our political and historical philosophers and theorists.  For the most part our history is written with a more sublime disregard of the simple facts of the world than is shown perhaps in any other department of human thought and inquiry.

You may today read histories of Europe written by men of worldwide and pre-eminent reputation, professing to tell the story of the development of human society, in which whole volumes will be devoted to the effect of a particular campaign or military alliance in influencing the destinies of a people like the French or the German.  But in those histories you will find no word as to the effect of such trifles as the invention of the steam engine, the coming of the railroad, the introduction of the telegraph and cheap newspapers and literature on the destiny of those people; volumes as to the influence which Britain may have had upon the history of France or Germany by the campaigns of Marlborough, but absolutely not one word as to the influence which Britain had upon the destinies of those people by the work of Watt and Stephenson.

A great historian philosopher laying it down that the “influence” of England was repelled or offset by this or that military alliance, seriously stated that “England” was losing her influence on the Continent at a time when her influence was transforming the whole lives of Continental people to a greater degree than they had been transformed since the days of the Romans.