in political and social conditions than the world has ever seen. The religious revolt of the sixteenth century is a Teutonic inheritance—a revolt which transmitted some evils, but which abjured formalism and based merit upon the essential, conscious attitude of man. If the impulse that grew into the revolution of the eighteenth century and led to political emancipation was not of Teutonic origin, it was received and cherished everywhere by Teutonic peoples, and was carried by them to permanent conclusions. The modern Teuton is found in his highest development in the intelligent American of to-day. The ancient Teuton caught up the torch of civilization, and in the fourteen centuries since has carried it far. It is, perhaps, a return kindly made by fate that the light of that torch was for many years a beacon to benighted Italy. The modern Teuton extends to her the hand of enlightened sympathy, and remembers in gratitude the great gift received from her in the early centuries.
And we inherit from the ancients, those master minds that were the authors of great conceptions when the world was young. Greece was the Shakespeare of the ancient world. It transmuted all that it had received from the nations of the Orient into forms of surpassing genius, even as the great master of the Elizabethan period of our era turned all that he touched into precious metal. When the world was crude, and there were no great originals to imitate, it meant much to create, and create so perfectly that many of the results have ever since been ideals for all peoples. Phidias and Apelles, Pericles and Demosthenes, Homer and Euripides, Herodotus and Xenophon, Aristides, Socrates and
