beauty, research, and
raised, in raising Greece, the whole human race thenceforth.

What might they not have done--looking at what they actually did--for the
whole race of man?

But no--they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and
their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing
ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of
the whole old world--the Scapia or Figaro of the old world--infinitely
able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base
self. The Greekling--as Juvenal has it--in want of a dinner, would climb
somehow to heaven itself, at the bidding of his Roman master.

Ah, what a fall! And what was the inherent weakness which caused that
fall?

I say at once--want of honesty. The Greek was not to be depended on; if
it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and think
it no sin. He was the sharpest of men. Sharp practice, in our modern
sense of the word, was the very element in which he floated. Any scholar
knows it. In the grand times of Marathon and Salamis, down to the
disastrous times of the Peloponnesian war and the thirty tyrants, no
public man's hands were clean, with the exception, perhaps, of that
Aristides, who was banished because men were tired of hearing him called
the Just. The exciting cause of the Peloponnesian war, and the
consequent downfall of Athens, was not merely the tyranny she exercised
over the states allied to her, it was the sharp practice of the
Athenians, in misappropriating the tribute paid by the allies to the
decoration of Athens. And in laying the foundations of the Parthenon was
sown, by a just judgment, the seed of ruin for the state which gloried in
it. And if the rulers were such, what were the people? If the free were
such, what were the slaves?

Hence, weakness at home and abroad, mistrust of generals and admirals,
paralysing all bold and clear action, peculations and corruptions at
home, internecine wars between factions inside states, and between states
or groups of states, revolutions followed by despotism, and final
exhaustion and slavery,-- slavery to a people who were coming across the
western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring nothing for art, or
science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel, but with a certain rough
honesty, reverence for country, for law, and for the ties of a
family--men of a somewhat old English type, who had over and