To-day they openly aspire to the primacy of the world’s civilization, the direction of its ideas, and think themselves the forerunners of all culture that is to prevail. The colloquial phrase, ironically quoted by Laboulaye, ‘‘America can beat the world,” is taken seriously by almost any virile Westerner. At the bottom of their open rivalry with Europe lies a contempt for it that is almost naive, and the profound conviction that within a brief period they are destined to eclipse its glory and do away with its spiritual superiority; thus once more fulfilling, in the progress of civilization, the hard law of the ancient mysteries, whereby the initiated shall put to death the initiator. It were useless to seek to convince them that, although their services to inventions and material advance have been doubtless great, even rising to the measure of a universal human obligation, they do not of themselves suffice to alter the axis of the earth. It were useless to seek to convince them that the fires lit upon European altars, the work done by peoples living these three thousand years gone by about the shores of the Mediterranean, though rising to glorious genius when bound with the olive and the palm of Athens, a work still being carried on and in whose traditions and teachings we South Americans live, makes a sum which cannot be equalled by any equation of Washington plus Edison. Would they even revise the Book of Genesis, to put themselves upon the front page?

But, aside from the insufficiency of the part that is given them to play in the education of humanity, their own character itself precludes all possibility of their hegemony. Nature has not granted them the genius for propaganda, the vocation of he apostle. They lack that great gift of amiability — likeableness, in a lofty sense; that extraordinary power of sympathy with which those races endowed by Providence for the task of education know how to make of their culture a beauty, as did Greece, loveable, eternal, and yet always with something of their own.

North American civilization may abound — it does abound — in fertile suggestions, profitable examples; it may inspire admiration, astonishment, respect; but it is rare for the foreigner to feel his heart come to his mouth with strong emotion when first he sees that Bartholdi statue holding high its torch of Liberty over New York Harbour; that thrill profound with which the ancient traveller saw the rosy light of the marble and the sheen of Athena’s spear over the early dawn on the Acropolis.

But please remember that when I, in the name of their soul’s rights, deny to their utilitarianism the right to impose itself as typical of the future on the world as mould or model, I do not in the least assert that its labours are wasted even in relation to those things which we may call soul-interests.... Without the arm which clears and constructs, there might now be no shelter for the brain that thinks; without some certain conquest of the materialities, the rule of the spiritualities in human societies becomes impossible. Renan’s aristocratic idealism recognized, even from the point of view of the moral interest of the race and its future spiritual development, the import of the utilitarian labour of this century; “To get away from need is to redeem oneself.” In the remote past even the prosaic and selfish activities of the merchant resulted in putting for the first time a people in relation with others, and thus had a far-reaching effect on men’s ideas; since this had much to do with multiplying the means of intelligence, refining and softening manners, perhaps even showing the way to a more advanced morality; and the same positive force appears later, favouring the higher ideals of civilization. It was the gold accumulated by the merchants of the Italian republics that paid, says Saint-Victor, for the works of the Renaissance. The ships that came back from the countries of the Thousand and One Nights, laden with ivory and spices, made it possible for Lorenzo di Medici to renew in Florentine merchants’ houses the feast of Plato. All history shows a definite relation of growth between the progress of utilitarian activity and the ideal. And just as the former can be turned into a shelter and protection for the latter, so the ideas of the mind often give rise to utilitarian results, above all when these latter are not sought directly. For instance, Bagehot remarks that the immense positive benefits of navigation might never have been attained for humanity if in earliest times there had not been dreamers, apparently idle — and certainly misunderstood by their contemporaries — who were interested solely in the contemplation of the movements of the stars.

This law of harmony bids us also respect the arm that labours arduously in what seems a barren and prosaic soil. The work of North American positivism will also at the end serve the cause of Ariel. That which this people of Cyclops have achieved for the direct purpose of material advantage, with all their sense for what is useful and their admirable faculty of mechanical invention, will be converted by other peoples, or later, even by themselves, to a wealth of material for the higher selection. Thus that most precious and fundamental invention of the alphabet, which gives the wings of immortality to the spoken word, originated in Phoenician shops, the discovery of merchants who only desired to keep their accounts. Using it for purposes merely mercenary, they never dreamed that the genius of a superior race would transfigure and transform it to a means of perpetuating the light and the learning of their own being. The relation between material good and good that is intellectual or moral is thus only a new aspect of that modem doctrine which we call the transformation of energy; material wellbeing may be transformed into spiritual superiority.

But North American life does not as yet offer us any new example of this indiscutable relation, nor even dimly suggest it as the triumph of the generation to come.

Our wish and our belief, indeed, incline us to hope that a superior destiny may be reserved for that civilization in a time not too remote for prophecy; the more that, under the spur of their energy, even the brief time that separates them from their dawn has sufficed to satisfy the expenditure of the vitality required for such immense achievement. Their past, their present, must be but the entry-way to a great future. Yet all shows that this is still far away from its definitive. The assimilative energy which has so far enabled them to maintain a certain uniformity as well as some touch of genius, despite the enormous inrush of ethnic elements opposed to those which have so far made the basis of their character, will have to do battle every day more strenuous, and in their utilitarianism, which proscribes all ideality, will find no inspiration sufficiently strong to maintain their solidarity with the older ideal. The illustrious thinker, who compared the slave of olden times to an atom outside the attraction of the social orbit, might well use the same comparison to characterize that numerous colony of German origin now peopling the Middle and Northern West, which preserves intact in their nature, their society, and their customs, the impression of that German spirit which in many of its profoundest and strongest characteristics must be considered as the actual antithesis of the American... And also, a civilization which is destined to survive and spread throughout the world; which has not mummified itself in the manner of the Chinese by losing all capability of change; cannot indefinitely prolong the direction of its energies to one order of things alone. Let us hope, then, that the spirit of that Titanic organism, which has so far been utility and will-power only, may some day also be intelligence, sentiment, ideality; that from that mighty forge may arise, in last result, the noble human figure, harmonious, select, that Spencer foreshadowed in the discourse I have adverted to. But we may not look for him in the present reality of that people, nor in their immediate future; and we must give up hoping to find the perfect type of an exemplary civilization in what is now but a rough sketch, huge and misshapen, having to pass through many correcting hands before it assumes the serene, the perfect shape of a people that have fully developed their genius and contemplate their work, finis coronat, gloriously crowned. So, in his “Dream of the Condor,” Leconte de Lisle depicts the ascension on strong wings and at last the Olympian tranquillity far above the snowpeaks of the Cordilleras!

Before posterity, before history, every great people ought to appear as a growth whose harmonious development has produced a fruit whose fine essence offers to the future the fragrance of its ideality and a fecund seed. Without this durable, human result, raised above the transitory end of the immediately useful, the power and grandeur of empires are but as dreams of a night in the existence of man, to be unheeded, uncounted in the doings of the day which weave the world’s destiny. A great civilization, a great people, in the eye of history, is that which after its time has passed still leaves the chords of its memory vibrating, its spirit a lasting legacy to posterity, a new and divine portion of the sum of things.