37 
In the little hill country of Palestine, round the centre 
Jerusalem, there lived a wondrous people called the Jews. 
It is recorded that 42,360 people returned from the Babylonish 
captivity. A humble beginning, indeed, but pregnant with 
mighty possibilities ! Imbued with intense independence 
preventing intermarriage, with the glorious legacies of Mosaic 
and prophetical writings, they have retained, ’mid scorn and 
contempt, their solidarity unimpaired. How memorable in 
words and deeds ! Beaconsfield used to assert that they 
intellectually conquered Europe, a statement we cannot well 
deny. They have given us a law-giver whose laws are still 
obeyed ; a sage whose wisdom is still a proverb among the 
nations of the world ; a universal poet in the person of David, 
the sweet singer of Israel ; a teacher whose doctrines have 
influenced the whole civilised world. They gave the highest 
in religion to the world, and this at a time when “ all our 
fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” 
Athens, on the highest authority, had a free-born population 
of 150,000 out of a total of 365,000. It is asserted that the 
culture of the Athenians in the age of Pericles was as much 
above our culture to-day, as our culture is above the barbarian 
Afiican. This for the contentious reader. In no other age 
or state has so small a population produced so many men of 
genius whose rare taste and ability were not wasted or mis- 
directed, but were stimulated and called into healthy action 
by the very circumstances of the every-day life they lived. 
Individual genius found free play there and was spent in 
gaining not a transient but an immortal glory. Great men are 
the products of a great age, and are typical of and crystallize 
the character of their age. What a galaxy of genius in drama, 
rhetoric, sculpture, art, philosophy, etc. Without Pericles 
and the money he lavished on pageants, temples, and statues, 
the sophists and philosophers he sheltered, the immortal 
works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, {we 
should have been the poorer by the loss of one half of our 
intellectual life. 
On the best antiquarian authority, Rome had a population 
of 300,000 enjoying the total rights of the civitas. There is 
much in Roman culture that is imitative of Athens, and much 
of its glory is the perpetuation of Greek legacies. But the 
Muses’ flame was fanned by the same spirit and became the 
light which was to illumine the Etruscan cities, and through 
them, dark gentile Europe. Roman dominion became a 
kind of framework in which Greek intelligence could be fitted, 
and the new environment invigorated many of its aspects. 
