ested the merits of modern civilization, just as in
Peloponnesus and Attica were tested those of the old; here, too, must
be tested the strength even of Christianity as a practical power in
the political world. Where Ionic and Doric Greece stood twenty-three
centuries ago, stand today the Northern and Southern sections of this
country; they hold between them, as did their Hellenic prototypes, the
heritage of laborious ages, and to their eyes alone have the slowly
growing fruits of time seemed ready, from very ripeness, to fall into
the lap of man. In either case, Hellenic or American, we look upon
generations totally different in circumstance from those which came
before them,--generations, freed not only from the despotic tutelage of
Nature, (from whom they exact tribute, instead of, as formerly, paying
it to her,) but also from the still more galling tutelage of ignorance
and of the social necessities imposed by ignorance,--generations which,
in either the ancient or modern instance, stand representatively for
the whole race, and by necessity, since they only could fairly be said,
unimpeded by external conditions, perfectly to represent themselves. It
matters not whether we take the particular generation contemporary with
Pericles or with President Lincoln (his modern _redivivus_); each stands
illustrious as the last reach upward of the towering civilizations that
respectively pushed them to this eminence; the highest point is in each
case reached, and all that remains is to make this sublime elevation
tenable for the race universally, so that, instead of the pyramidal
mountain, we shall have the widely extended _plateau_.

Here we will anticipate a question which the reader, we imagine, is
already about to put. He will readily admit that Greece, in her palmiest
era, politically, grasped, in form and conception at least, the highest
ideal of rational liberty; but why, he will ask, was not this divine
boon made universally available? Why was it not extended to Persia, and
to the Asiatic hosts that for security hid themselves in the folds of
her garments? why not to the dwellers on the Nile? Why was it that it
was not even retained by Greece herself? The truth is, that no sooner
was the golden fleece in the hands of the adventurers that had sought it
so zealously than it was rent by their discords. Elements of barbarism
had run uncurbed alongside of intellectual and artistic refinements.
Mingled with high-minded heroes w