harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. We aim in perfect confidence at developing the whole human being without violence to any part of it. It is in this ideal that we have found our famous gospel of the rights of man. The rights of man consist simply in a systematization of Greek and French ideas, in a consecration of the supremacy of self, as against abnegation and religious sacrifice. In France, Mr. Matthew Arnold says, the desires of the flesh, and current ideas, are mistaken for the rights of man. While we are pursuing one ideal, other peoples, more tightly chained to Hebraism, continue to cultivate that justice which is founded on renouncement. From time to time they look with envy out of their own austere and dull life, and with admiration upon the French ideal which is so positive, so clear, so satisfying; they are half inclined at times to make a trial of it. France has exerted a charm on the entire world. Everyone at some period or other of his life has thirsted for the French ideal, has desired to make a trial of it. The French wear the guise of the people to whom has been intrusted the beautiful, the charming ideal of the future, and other nations cry: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” And Ishmael seems to grow more and more brilliant each day, seems certain of success, is on the point of making the conquest of the world. But at this moment a disaster occurs, the Crisis, the Biblical judgment arrives at the moment of triumph; behold the judgment of the world! The world, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, was judged in 1870: the Prussians were Javeh’s substitute. And once more Ishmael, the spirit of Greece, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of France, free-thought, and free conduct were conquered by Israel, by the spirit of the Bible, by the spirit of the Middle Ages. A brilliant but superficial civilization was crushed beneath the weight of the barbarous and unyielding asceticism of a more or less naïve faith. Javeh is even in the present century the god of battles, and woe to the individuals who do not believe, with the ancient Jew, that abnegation constitutes three-fourths of life, and that art and science together barely fill the other fourth. [Sidenote: Victorious superiority of Hellenism.]