The Unity of Western Civilization Part 9

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual pa.s.sion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Moliere or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all.

It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_.

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Beroul); Mary of France, _Lais_.

Dante, _Divina Commedia_.

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_.

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prevost, _Manon Lescaut_.

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_.

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c..

Victor Hugo, _Legende des Siecles_.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human a.s.sociation. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed ill.u.s.trated--unfortunately ill.u.s.trated as it happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated.

Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.

SECTION I.--UNITY OF CHARACTER

There is a certain unity of character running through all civilization, and indeed through all humanity. Certain fundamental inst.i.tutions and principles of organization are common to East and West, to the ancient and modern world, to civilization and savagery, and there is not the least evidence that the similarities are the result of historic connexion. On the contrary, they arise from a human nature which is fundamentally the same, adjusting itself to conditions of life which are fundamentally the same. But of course it is only the broadest and most general characters that are thus common to all the world. Within them there is every sort and degree of specific difference. There are types within types, worlds within worlds, and what we call Western civilization is one of these. That is to say, it is at the present day a family or group of nations sharing in common certain things which distinguish it from the rest of the world, such things, for instance, as a certain degree of social order, a certain outlook upon life, certain fundamentals of religion and ethics, and an industrial organization based on applied science. Now to mention any of these points is at once to provoke a criticism. In each respect, it will be said, the nations of Western Europe and the lands that have been colonized from them differ vastly among themselves. The social order of Germany is by no means that of England. The industrial development of southern Italy is very different from that of Belgium. The Prussian outlook upon life--this in particular will be emphasized just now--is quite another thing from the French. This is true enough, but once again it means only that there are further specific differences within the genus. We could pursue the differences as far down as we like. For the United Kingdom, say, is by no means one h.o.m.ogeneous whole. Even within England alone deep contrasts reveal themselves between the agricultural South and the industrial North. Yet we do not hesitate to think of the English character, English inst.i.tutions, the English type as distinct from the rest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a real unity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higher remove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper and wider differences that appear in the various centres of Western civilization.

SECTION II.--UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction.

That is why it is in the ma.s.s a community of ideas, for ideas pa.s.s from man to man and from nation to nation more readily than inst.i.tutions, more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic const.i.tution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its international character, for there are constantly arising local and temporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics, philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.

This commonwealth has its foundations in the past. It derives in the first instance from the unity of mediaeval Christendom, where it enjoyed the advantage of a common language of learning, the gradual loss of which is imperfectly compensated by the possession of two or three modern languages alone by the educated man of the present day. Through mediaeval Christendom and through the Arabic schools, which can hardly be regarded as a part of Western civilization but in the Middle Ages were rather its teachers, it derives from the Greco-Roman world, and through the Greco-Roman world from the Greeks themselves. The Greeks in their turn were aware that they owed the rudiments of their science to the ancient civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates. Thus in the intellectual world there is a continuity stretching back six thousand years or more to the beginnings of recorded civilization. More than once the continuity is nearly broken, but some strand is always preserved, and it is in this continuity in the world of ideas that we get the main evidence of such progress as human history reveals.

The foundations of material civilization were laid in Egypt and in Babylonia, where the progress made in agriculture and the industrial arts implies a considerable body of empirical knowledge of physics and chemistry at an early date. We have Egyptian textbooks of arithmetic dating from the eighteenth and perhaps from the twelfth dynasty. We have texts dealing with the rudiments of geometry. Empirical chemistry appears to be of Egyptian origin, the word itself is referred to the Egyptian term for black earth--and to have pa.s.sed to the Arabs, who made it into a quant.i.tative science, without greatly interesting the scientific mind of Greece. Careful astronomical records extending over thousands of years were kept both in Egypt and Babylonia, and upon them a considerable body of astronomical knowledge was built up. But there is no evidence of a scientific interest detached at once from theology and industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early became dissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of the G.o.dhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often, in a mystical identification of all the G.o.ds as so many incarnations or impersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindred speculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entire achievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was of little importance as compared with that of other oriental civilizations.

Thus without underestimating a debt which the Greeks themselves acknowledged, it remains true to regard science and philosophy alike as in essence an original creation of the Greek genius. What grew up in Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. was the spirit of disinterested inquiry proceeding on rational methods. By the term disinterested I mean detached from ulterior objects. Geometry for the Greek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomy something more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling an eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to penetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry.

It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particular triangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt to grasp the nature of s.p.a.ce relations and to understand them as depending on simple common principles. This is to say that in the hands of the Greeks these subjects first became sciences. But a still greater subject also became in their hands matter for disinterested rational inquiry.

They developed what Aristotle called the science of Reality, or, as we call it, Philosophy--the attempt to approach by the rational criticism of experience the problem of the nature and origin of the universe and of man's place therein. They propounded the fundamental questions which still occupy the highest intellects of mankind. They laid the foundations of method and bequeathed to Europe the terminology which all exact thinking requires. Even when we speak of method we are using an Aristotelian term, and when we distinguish one subject from another we are employing the Latin translation of the word which Aristotle introduced. In a word, modern thought, scientific and philosophic alike, has a unitary origin. It is derived from the Greek.

The mode of this derivation is not simple, and would require considerable s.p.a.ce to examine in detail. In outline it must suffice to say that the Greek culture was spread over the Eastern Mediterranean through the conquests of Alexander, and that as its capital Alexandria gradually replaced Athens. It flowed westward with the Roman conquests, when, as the Roman poet said, captured Greece took captive her barbarous conqueror and introduced the arts into rustic Latium. It shared in the general decline which accompanied the rebarbarization and final collapse of the Roman Empire. But now occurred a division in the stream of historic tendency. The fortunes of East and West were separated. The Western Empire was overrun by Germanic tribes, and after the sixth century the tradition of the old culture was maintained for the most part in the monasteries. Greek was forgotten in the West. Greek authors were known only in Latin translations, and science and philosophy came to a standstill. In the East the Mohammedan conquests brought the Arabs into touch with Greek learning. They preserved the tradition and extended the work, and it was the contact with Arabic culture through the crusades which initiated the first renaissance in the West in the twelfth century. There followed the epoch of the great mediaeval systems, the rediscovery of Aristotle and the attempt to fuse the Christian faith with the Aristotelian system. The later Middle Age was the period at which Western civilization was most distinctly a cultural unit, the scene of a great attempt to unify all the aspects of life, the religious, the philosophic, the political, on the basis of a religious faith made articulate and systematic with the aid of Greek philosophy, speaking the Latin tongue as the common possession of all educated men.

The paradox of thought is that while unity is its ideal, freedom is its necessary condition, and endless divergence the inevitable consequence.

There could not be much thinking about matters of faith without heresy, nor about matters of politics without disaffection, rebellions and new political grouping. Heresy and schism broke up the mediaeval unity and reinforced the political tendencies making towards the modern state system. The rise of modern literature displaced the cla.s.sics from their unique position as literary models. After the seventeenth century the habit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oust Latinity, and culture in each country began to a.s.sume more of a distinctively national character. Specific national characteristics began to appear in science and philosophy as well as in literature and education, and a large part of the history of modern thought depends on the partial independence on the one hand and the frequent interactions on the other of these centres.

SECTION III.--UNITY OF INTERCONNEXION

This brings us to the third sense in which unity can be predicated of a cultural group. The unity that depends on the interconnexion of distinct parts implies some differences of character. Western civilization has lost something of the unity of character which it owed to its common origin, though it still retains enough of it to figure as a single whole in contrast to the rest of the world. We may be sure that the differences between German, French, and English seem much less marked to the intelligent Chinese than they are to Germans, Frenchmen, and English themselves. We ourselves habitually think of China and j.a.pan together as denizens of the Far East, and it is only personal acquaintance which makes us begin to mark the differences between them. Few Europeans, I imagine, get as far in their discrimination as to appreciate the distinctions between the Northern and Southern Chinese, which are as clear to the Chinese themselves as the difference between English and Scottish is to us. Western civilization does retain a generic unity of character, though national differences have had an increasing influence in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile the unity of interconnexion has on the whole grown closer with the spread of education, the multiplication of learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the most interesting chapters in the development of modern thought can be written, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on the theme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought, and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations might seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to each other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism; English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth, French exact.i.tude, German detail,--how much poorer the world would be if any one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines without the criticism of the other two. What a special providence gave the easy-going Englishman a northern neighbour to lecture him on German metaphysics in his own tongue and compel him to the definiteness which he instinctively detests. Without Scotland as a link, the connexion between English and German thought would hardly have been effective and continuous, and it was a Scotsman who aroused the greatest of German metaphysicians--himself of Scottish descent--from his dogmatic slumbers.

This international division of labour is more significant in the regions of metaphysics and political thought than of physical science. To science, every modern nation has contributed both great names and useful journeyman work. Through the medium of the learned reviews and of periodical congresses science has become more and more international. It is still possible now and again for a great discovery like that of Mendel or an important hypothesis like that of the kinetic theory of gases to be ignored for a whole generation. But this does not seem to depend especially on difficulties of language or of international communication. There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in the scientific world which every now and then decrees that certain people shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy their structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of pure reasoning by a.s.suming the robe of science and entering the laboratory.

But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which dictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world there operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It has sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had written either in French or in English. This is due to a certain encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German industry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say, on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but writing down _all_ that is to be found out in all the authorities bearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and, taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tedious for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed, such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is the element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often lacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and Italian added together. If you pa.s.s from quant.i.ty to quality, if you take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student.

Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the general cause of the advancement of learning.

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under foreign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their own. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience.

This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the growth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence in England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it had little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching.

But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an easy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do them reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth cla.s.s in the Final Schools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to a.n.a.lyse the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original, and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of a.s.similation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lack of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can see. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas which the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. The Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman as a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to test and handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it be produced' is the frequent remark of Hume--Scotsman in some respects, but very English in this--whenever he is dealing with some conception not readily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself was not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are not readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call the imponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault.

It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too p.r.o.ne to use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value.

We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a good deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers the conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means comes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an ent.i.ty as obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not just the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the Kaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State, and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To the natural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial. Talk to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must get it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as the Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses its well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men and women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment after the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whether through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of dealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they cannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of the State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt that it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much that was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thing that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we have learned from her.

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought of Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham.

Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but related Manchester school had two generations of development in England, and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era that should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of mankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting through J.S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush of its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influences overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In this story of political thought events have been no less potent than arguments. The failure and success of inst.i.tutions, the victories and defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of those principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive steps by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the middle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that reason, in the att.i.tude of men to fundamental questions of social ethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European cataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal and humanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reaction against them towards the close. The causes of such a change are multifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year 1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so that he will find in the present war another turning-point from which a new movement is to begin.

Be this as it may, we may rest a.s.sured that the political thought of Europe, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward or backward as a unity. It may move by peaceful and friendly co-operation or by the stimulus of embittered rivalry. But its many centres are related by so many strands of connexion that the movement in any one of these is reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emanc.i.p.ation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the impressions of near and striking events and to the seductions of intellectual fashion. Yet, if the larger thought is worth anything, it should enable those who follow it to look a little further beyond the present and a little deeper below the surface differences that distract the kindred peoples. If the thinkers are true to their thought it may be that from them will come the beginnings of the healing process which Europe will need. Much is being and will be said of the political reconstruction which is needed to restore and secure the civilized order. But the commonwealth of thought will revive of itself from the day when peace is concluded. German physiology will not be less learned, German scientists will not be less expert, German chemists will not be less pre-eminent because their military lords have plunged Europe into a disastrous war. We shall need their services, shall watch their experiments, read their records, and utilize their brains as before.

Perhaps it may be some years before the international congresses can be resumed, but the internationalism of learning will revive of itself, against our wills if not by and with our wills, and in the world of science, and in this world alone, the event of war will make no difference. Conqueror and conquered will work at the same task and meet as equals. The scientific demonstration knows no more of the nationality of its originator than of his caste or colour, age or s.e.x. In this one real democracy the idea, the hypothesis, the proof, whatever it may be, stands or falls on its own merits with no questions asked as to its ancestors or country of origin. In the growth of this commonwealth war is but a momentary check. Its destiny is to become wider in extent, closer in its interconnexions, and not less rich in the diversities of its national centres. Whether it is also destined to grow into a political unity the future must decide. At least we can say that for any such unity it provides the only sure and solid foundation.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Merz, _History of European Thought in the 19th Century_. W. Blackwood.

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press.