contest to find the new conception of Roman
history, which, suited to the changed needs, may revivify classical
studies; a competition followed by no despicable prize, the
intellectual influence that a people may exercise on other peoples by
means of these studies. To win in this contest we must never forget,
as too many of us have done in the past thirty years, that a man can
rule and refashion the world from the depths of a library, but only
on condition that he does not immure himself there; that, while the
physical sciences propose to understand matter in order to transform
it, historico-philosophical discipline has for its end action upon the
mind and the will; that philosophical ideas and historic teachings
are but seeds shut up to themselves unless they enter the soil of the
universal intellectual life.

No: the time-stained marbles of Rome must not end beside
cuneiform-inscribed bricks or Egyptian mummies, in the vast dead
sections of archaeological halls; they must serve to pave for our feet
the way that leads to the future. Therefore nothing could have been
pleasanter or more grateful to me, after receiving the invitation
tendered me by the _College de France_, and that from South America,
than to accept the invitation of the First Citizen of the United
States to visit this world which is being formed. In Paris, that
wonderful metropolis of the Latin world, I had the joy, the highest
reward for my long, hard labour, to show to the incredulous how much
alive the supposedly dead history of Rome still is, when on those
unforgettable days so cosmopolite a public gathered from every part of
the city in the small plain hall of the old and august edifice. Coming
into your midst, I feel that the history of Rome lives not only in the
interest with which you have followed these lectures, but also, even
if in part without clear cognisance, in things here, in the life you
lead, in what you accomplish. The heritage of Rome is, for the peoples
of America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purely
artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the
most beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it might
be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true
heir of Rome; that the new world is nearer--by apparent paradox--to
ancient Rome than is Europe. Among the most important facts, however
little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should
n