"One loves to dream of how that race must have looked, there under that sky, while yet the world was young, and while the energy and beauty of youth was upon it. There was no steam power to assist, no power drills, there were only rude, untempered tools. The plain wedge, and the lever in its more effective form, were about all that was known of mechanics; still from the quarries of Syene, far up the Nile, those blocks were wrested, hewed, transported, lifted up and laid in place, and with such mathematical precision was the work performed, that the ebb and flow of the centuries have no effect upon the work. While this material work was going on, in the same realm wise men were putting into a language the alphabet of the sky, tracing out the procession of the stars and solving the mystery of the seasons. When we think of Ancient Egypt, it is not of her kings, but what was wrought out there by brain and hand. "To-day I was at work on the twenty-four hundred-foot level of the mine. Around me power drills were working, cars were rattling, cages were running; three hundred men were stoping, timbering and rolling cars to and from the chutes and ore-breasts, and in the spectral light I thought it was a scene for a painter. But while so thinking, for some reason, there came to me the thought of the one hundred times three hundred men, who, for a generation, worked on a single pyramid; worked without pay days, without so much as a kind word, and on poorer fare than one gets at a fourth-rate miners' boarding house; and, as I reflected over that, our little work here seemed small indeed. "So, in estimating Greece, we do not pick out a few men or women to remember, but we think of the race that made Thermopylæ and Marathon possibilities, of the men who followed Xenophon, of the women who closed their hearts and left their deformed offspring to perish in the woods that Greece should rear no woman who could not bear soldiers, no man who could not bear arms; of the race so finely strung that poetry was born of it; that sculpture and eloquence were so perfected in, that to copy is impossible; that was so susceptible to beauty that it turned justice aside, and yet that was so valiant that it mastered the world.