Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught--Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland--in times past and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral well-being of man--his intellectual and therefore his mental and social happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the United States, was enjoying--a vast and fertile soil, an equable climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not achievement, among other things. Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but oared boats--not even the trireme at first--no compass, no machinery, no implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen, Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho, its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers--the greatest in all the world--Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or they are not.