Page:Charactersevents00ferriala.djvu/274

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finding in it models in miniature of all our life will have this effect, that classical studies remain the educational foundation of the intelligent classes in all European-American civilisation. These studies may be reformed; they may be as they ought, restricted to a smaller number of persons; but if it is not desired--as of course it cannot be--that in the future all men be purely technical capacities and merely living machines to create material riches; if, on the contrary, it is desired that in every nation the chosen few that govern have a philosophical consciousness of universal life, no means is better suited to instil this philosophic consciousness than the study of ancient Rome, its history, its civilisation, its laws, its politics, its art, and its religions, exactly because Rome is the completest and most lucid synthesis of universal life.

Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectual and moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations that the Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for the Latin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from their ancestors. The young Germans and Englishmen who study Greek and Latin, who translate Cicero or construe Horace, assimilate the Latin spirit,