18 HEREDITY. 



the globe to-day, as the ability of that proudest race 

 is higher than that of the African. 



Perhaps if we place Bacon by the side of Plato, 

 and Michael Angelo by the side of Phidias, our esti- 

 mates will produce no great debate. But when we 

 have mentioned Shakspeare and Milton, when we 

 have taken into view five or six statesmen, we very 

 soon find that we are running outside the range of 

 two hundred years. Take the two thousand years 

 since Greece fell, sum up all the brilliant stars in the 

 historic firmament of those twenty centuries, and 

 there is no more light in all that wide heaven than 

 in the single Greek constellation of Orion, or in the 

 compact Athenian Pleiades, which blaze close about 

 us as we stand here on the Acropolis. [Applause.] 



It will be remembered that the average free-born 

 citizens of Athens could listen to the orations of 

 Demosthenes, and immediately vote at the close of 

 them. We have these orations written out by him- 

 self; and Rufus Choate used to say that there is not 

 an audience in the United States, except the judges 

 and lawyers of the Supreme Court, that could bear 

 such condensation of matter. Some one has remarked 

 that you cannot strike a word out of Milton with a 

 trip-hammer. It may be said of the orations of 

 Demosthenes, that the most powerful impact of iron 

 and brass will not strike out a single stone from the 

 rhetorical monument he has raised to himself, and 

 not to himself only, but to the audiences who could 

 follow him with delight. Athenian citizens had been 

 so trained in public debate, and had so educated 



