One has to stop and uproot impressions that are almost instinctive, to remember that our forefathers reached these shores by virtue of knowledge which they owed to the astronomical researches of Egyptians and Chaldeans, who inspired the astronomers of Greece, who inspired those of the Renaissance in Italy, Spain, and Germany, keeping alive and developing not merely the art of measuring space and time, but also that conception of order in external nature without which the growth of organized knowledge, which we call science, enabling men to carry on their exploitation of the world, would have been impossible; that our very alphabet comes from Rome, who owed it to others; that the mathematical foundation of our modern mechanical science--without which neither Newton nor Watt nor Stevenson nor Ericson nor Faraday nor Edison could have been--is the work of Arabs, strengthened by Greeks, protected and enlarged by Italians; that our conceptions of political organization, which have so largely shaped our political science, come mainly from the Scandinavian colonists of a French province; that British intellect, to which perhaps we owe the major part of our political impulses, has been nurtured mainly by Greek philosophy; that our Anglo-Saxon law is principally Roman, and our religion almost entirely Asiatic in its origins; that for those things which we deem to be the most important in our lives, our spiritual and religious aspirations, we go to a Jewish book interpreted by a Church Roman in origin, reformed mainly by the efforts of Swiss and German theologians. And this interaction of the respective elements of the various nations, the influence of foreigners, in other words, and of foreign ideas, is going to be far more powerful in the future than it has been in the past. Morally, as well as materially, we are a part of Europe. The influence which one group exercises on another need not operate through political means at all; indeed, the strongest influences are non-political. American life and civilization may be transformed by European developments, though the Governments of Europe may leave us severely alone. Luther and Calvin had certainly a greater effect in England than Louis XIV. or Napoleon. Gutenberg created in Europe a revolution more powerful than all the military revolutions of the last ten centuries. Greece and Palestine did not transform the world by their political power. Yet these simple and outstanding truths are persistently ignored by our political and historical philosophers and theorists. For the most part our history is written with a more sublime disregard of the simple facts of the world than is shown perhaps in any other department of human thought and inquiry.