398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



we come into immediate contact, whose disposition toward us constantly 

 elicits from us the greatest interest and anxiety, that we do not think 

 worthy of systematic study. It is of this alone that we are notoriously 

 ignorant. 



The best way, perhaps, of appreciating how wide the extent of this 

 ignorance is, will be by considering how great is the variety of knowl- 

 edge which an Oxford or Cambridge first-class man will often possess 

 respecting the whole national being of Greece and Rome. To begin 

 with, he will know the whole political development of those countries; 

 he will trace with accuracy the consistent progress of Athens to an 

 equal liberty among her citizens, through Solon, Cleisthenes, Aristides, 

 Pericles ; he will know by what causes she finally fell from her strength 

 and supremacy. From Demosthenes, he will know a good deal of the 

 nature of her laws, in their application to the manifold interests of men 

 to the injuries which one man may suffer from another, in person or 

 property, by fraud or violence. He will know something from the same 

 source of the way in which the rich Athenians managed their proper- 

 ties, of the number of their slaves, of their commerce, of their loans. 

 He will know how the Athenian navy was provided and kept up, what 

 was the pay of the sailors, how they manoeuvred against the enemy. 

 He will be intimately acquainted with every incident in the external 

 history of Athens ; and in the geography of Greece he will know the 

 situation of the minutest villages, the least important islands. All the 

 varied history of the Greek colonies, and their relations to their respec- 

 tive mother-cities, will be familiar to him. Besides this, he will know 

 how the Greeks themselves felt, thought, and theorized, on all these 

 matters of their national existence ; he will have read the " Repub- 

 lics " of Plato and of Aristotle ; he will be no stranger to their religious 

 feelings, or to their deepest speculations in philosophy. Finally, in 

 their poetry epic, tragedy, or comedy he will have felt the flow of 

 their fancy and imagination. All this, and much more, our first-class 

 man will be in a position to know about Greece ; and in Rome he will 

 have no less rich a field of information ; for, if the philosophy and poetry 

 of Rome do not possess an equal interest with those of Greece, the law, 

 politics, and military system of Rome possess much more. 



Such and so great a thing is it to know the whole being of a nation. 

 And this knowledge is actually held by no inconsiderable number of 

 people in England ; and there are many more who, though they do not 

 have it at their fingers' ends, would yet be readily able, by means of 

 excellent text-books and their own previous knowledge, to test in half 

 an hour any random assertions respecting the ancients made by an 

 incompetent authority. 



Now, let it be considered that there are five modern nations Eng- 

 land, France, Germany, Raly, and Spain who have each a history of 

 equal length with the authentic history of Greece or Rome, a literature 

 (at least in the first four cases) not greatly inferior, institutions and a 



