THE VINE AND CIVILIZATION. 15 
and yoke themselves to his chariot. In time the vine wins 
Asia Minor, the isles of the Mediterranean, Greece, Sicily, 
Italy, Gaul, and always leaves on its trace a shining»tract 
sufficient to illuminate the world. Everywhere where the grape 
ripens, the arts, poetry, eloquence, the exquisite sentiment of 
the beautiful bursts and expands, as under the enchanted 
zephyr of a beneficent divinity. The vine gloriously spreads 
its branches over the hills of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence. 
We may say with truth, and without restriction, that civiliza- 
tion is a flower that grows only spontaneously in the midst of 
vineyards,”’ 
The professor goes on to show that this assertion acquires 
the evidence of an axiom for minds who search to the bottom 
of things. 
““The most arduous problem of social economy is to point 
out the determining causes of civilization among peoples. If 
climate is the cause of different moral states of peoples, bar- 
barous at one epoch and civilized at another, as the Athens of 
Pericles and modern Athens, as the Rome of the Cwsars and 
the Rome of the middle ages, barbarous Gaul and the France 
of Louis XIV.—has the climate changed? Not the least in 
the world. 
‘* The modern liberal school make very little quéstion of race 
or climate. For civilization is nothing but the progress of 
light in the material and in the moral order. 
‘* The clergy, who have also the duty of civilizing the world, 
are in a situation diametrically opposed to that of the liberal 
school. They have received the truth; but, either that they 
understand it not, or pervert it, or that the good seed falls 
upon a badly prepared soil, the results obtained are little in 
proportion to the greatness of the means at their disposal. A 
thing most strange, and well worthy of our meditations — the 
