t to
appeal to men in all countries, to strong nations as well as to weak
nations.

The small States whose absorption is now threatened have been a potent
and useful--perhaps the most potent and useful--factor in the advance of
civilization. It is in them and by them that most of what is most
precious in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in science, and in
art has been produced.

The first great thoughts that brought man into true relation with God
came from a tiny people inhabiting a country smaller than Denmark. The
religions of mighty Babylon and populous Egypt have vanished; the
religion of Israel remains in its earlier as well as in that later form
which has overspread the world.

The Greeks were a small people, not united in one great State, but
scattered over coasts and among hills in petty city communities, each
with its own life. Slender in numbers, but eager, versatile, and
intense, they gave us the richest, most varied, and most stimulating of
all literatures.

When poetry and art reappeared after the long night of the Dark Ages,
their most splendid blossoms flowered in the small republics of Italy.

In modern Europe what do we not owe to little Switzerland, lighting the
torch of freedom 600 years ago and keeping it alight through all the
centuries when despotic monarchies held the rest of the European
Continent? And what to free Holland, with her great men of learning and
her painters surpassing those of all other countries save Italy?

So the small Scandinavian nations have given to the world famous men of
science, from Linnaeus downward; poets like Tegnor and Bjoernson;
scholars like Madvig; dauntless explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.

England had in the age of Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton a population
little larger than that of Bulgaria today. The United States in the days
of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Marshall
counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark or Greece. In the most brilliant
generations of German literature and thought, the age of Kant and
Lessing and Goethe, of Hegel and Schiller and Fichte, there was no real
German State at all, but a congeries of principalities and free
cities--independent centres of intellectual life in which letters and
science produced a richer crop than the two succeeding generations have
raised, just as Great Britain also, with eight times the population of
the year 1600, has had no more Shakespeares or Miltons.

Culture Decayed i