teraction of the respective elements of the various nations,
the influence of foreigners, in other words, and of foreign ideas, is
going to be far more powerful in the future than it has been in the
past. Morally, as well as materially, we are a part of Europe. The
influence which one group exercises on another need not operate through
political means at all; indeed, the strongest influences are
non-political.

American life and civilization may be transformed by European
developments, though the Governments of Europe may leave us severely
alone. Luther and Calvin had certainly a greater effect in England than
Louis XIV. or Napoleon. Gutenberg created in Europe a revolution more
powerful than all the military revolutions of the last ten centuries.
Greece and Palestine did not transform the world by their political
power. Yet these simple and outstanding truths are persistently ignored
by our political and historical philosophers and theorists. For the most
part our history is written with a more sublime disregard of the simple
facts of the world than is shown perhaps in any other department of
human thought and inquiry.

You may today read histories of Europe written by men of worldwide and
pre-eminent reputation, professing to tell the story of the development
of human society, in which whole volumes will be devoted to the effect
of a particular campaign or military alliance in influencing the
destinies of a people like the French or the German. But in those
histories you will find no word as to the effect of such trifles as the
invention of the steam engine, the coming of the railroad, the
introduction of the telegraph and cheap newspapers and literature on the
destiny of those people; volumes as to the influence which Britain may
have had upon the history of France or Germany by the campaigns of
Marlborough, but absolutely not one word as to the influence which
Britain had upon the destinies of those people by the work of Watt and
Stephenson.

A great historian philosopher laying it down that the "influence" of
England was repelled or offset by this or that military alliance,
seriously stated that "England" was losing her influence on the
Continent at a time when her influence was transforming the whole lives
of Continental people to a greater degree than they had been transformed
since the days of the Romans.

I have gone into this at some length to show mainly two things--first,
that neither morally nor materi