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
