The first great thoughts that brought man into true relation with God came from a tiny people inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark.  The religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished; the religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form which has overspread the world.

The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great State, but scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each with its own life.  Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of all literatures.

When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages, their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.

In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European Continent?  And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?

So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Bjoernson; scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.

England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population little larger than that of Bulgaria today.  The United States in the days of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece.  In the most brilliant generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real German State at all, but a congeries of principalities and free cities—­independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.

Culture Decayed in Imperial Rome.

No fiction is more palpably contradicted by history than that relied on by the school to which von Bernhardi belongs—­that culture, literary, scientific, and artistic, flourishes best in great military States.  The decay of art and literature in the Roman world began just when Rome’s military power had made that world one great and ordered State.  The opposite view would be much nearer the truth, though one must admit that no general theory regarding the relations of art and letters to Governments and political conditions has ever yet been proved to be sound.