No other laboratory can ever compare with this in importance for us. Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day, as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men, exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and vexed.