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 114 a personal and national equation. This, if one chooses so to regard it, limitation to national distinctiveness in dialect and expression, science shares with every member of the hierarchy appointed to lead man to the sanctuary of the heights vouchsafing the outlook and the uplook into the ideal meanings and relations of things. Art is certainly one of this priesthood. Yet, though she witnesses to a perfection which may beam upon man everywhere, she casts her testimony into certain moulds which differ not merely with the centuries, but also with the countries. Poetry is intensely human, and yet her melodies are always set to diverse keys chosen not merely under the pressure of individual temperament, but clearly responsive to national predispositions. Shakespeare prophesies of the eternally human, because he is so fundamentally British, Isaiah and the "son of man" have appeal for all generations and races, and yet they crystallize their stirring and uplifting thought along axes arising from the very soil of one land and the hopes of one people at definite periods of its career. Religion, the most universal of all human potencies, throws her white light into a many-colored spectrum, its lines varying with the zones and epochs revealing the medium through which the one common ray had to pass to token the bow of promise arching across the sky.

These historical conditions cannot be ignored. They are roots of power. The last decade of our century augurs so well for our nation because it proclaims the independence of the American university, as confidently as did the fourth quarter of the eighteenth compel recognition of the political autonomy of the republic by the nations of the earth. Independence, of course, can never be more than relative. Humanity whatever the complex manifestations of its teeming energies is organic. It holds its separate parts to interdependence. That the declaration of independence which for all mankind has made the Fourth of July sacramental was in its fundamental contentions not an original document, is not a secret. It is the precipitate of the political and philosophical doctrines of the age which lent tongue to Rousseau and pen to Montesquieu. Nevertheless, in its