rate from one another as from
ours.

I do not see how they can be all brought under one idea....

Gentlemen, let me here observe that I am not entering upon the question
of races, or upon their history. I have nothing to do with ethnology; I
take things as I find them on the surface of history and am but
classifying phenomena. Looking, then, at the countries which surround
the Mediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be from time
immemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mind such as to
deserve to be called the Intellect and the Mind of the Human Kind.
Starting as it does, and advancing from certain centres, till their
respective influences intersect and conflict, and then at length
intermingle and combine, a common Thought has been generated, and a
common Civilisation defined and established. Egypt is one such starting
point, Syria, another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and North Africa
a fifth--afterwards France and Spain. As time goes on, and as
colonisation and conquest work their changes, we see a great
association of nations formed, of which the Roman Empire is the
maturity and the most intelligible expression: an association, however,
not political but mental, based on the same intellectual ideas and
advancing by common intellectual methods.... In its earliest age it
included far more of the Eastern world than it has since; in these
later times it has taken into its compass a new hemisphere; in the
Middle Ages it lost Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to
Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time its territory
was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the existing
civilisation was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to stifle
it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came to expel them:
and thus the civilisation of modern times remains what it was of old;
not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or Saracen ... but the lineal
descendant, or rather the continuation--_mutatis mutandis_--of the
civilisation which began in Palestine and Greece.

To omit, then, all minor debts such as what of arithmetic, what of
astronomy, what of geography, we owe to the Saracen, from Palestine we
derive the faith of Europe shared (in the language of the Bidding Prayer)
by all Christian people dispersed throughout the world; as to Greece we
owe the rudiments of our Western art, philosophy, letters; and not only
t