INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION 333 



that it should number among them a few men of exalted virtue. 

 Such qualities as honesty must be ingrained in its masses. 

 Honesty cannot be produced in a factory and served out like 

 rifles in time of need. From which it follows that we must 

 expect to find the successful nations of the world improving in 

 moral fibre, while there may very possibly be little advance or 

 no advance at all in intellectual calibre. 



Yet some few intellects of the very highest calibre are 

 necessary to the nation if it is to make progress and keep 

 pace with other progressive nations. True, it is possible to do 

 much by imitating everything that foreign nations invent. Have 

 we not seen lately nations by this means producing great results? 

 But there are disadvantages in the system which hardly need 

 pointing out. And a nation requires other things besides mere 

 mechanical inventions if its life is to be vigorous and healthy. 

 In particular it requires a literature. The bard of the tribe importance 

 brought out all the fighting quality of the warriors. Among jJ,,JJ tera " 

 the ancient Jews it was the prophet who stimulated their nobler 

 aspirations and made and kept them a nation. Among modern 

 nations the power of literature is difficult to overestimate. A 

 writer who gives expression to what is in the minds of men 

 doubles the force of the feeling. Of late years it has been 

 possible to watch the steady growth of patriotism in England 

 and it is to writers, whether poets or prose authors, that we 

 owe most of this. But it is never possible for contemporaries 

 to see the whole effect that a great writer produces. Literature, 

 if it is of the highest kind, gains in power as time goes on. It 

 is their literary heritage that has made national life possible to 

 the modern Greeks. If they are not great as a nation, it is 

 because of deficiencies which ennobling influences are powerless 

 to make good. It is to their literature that the Jews owe the 

 fact that they have not been lost among the nations. Shake- 

 speare has done great things for England already, and if all 

 English-speaking communities ever face the world as one united 

 people, to him, more than to anyone else, it will be due. 



This suggests a question. National success requires only a 

 moderate average of intellect, but an occasional mind of a really 



