Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/470

 430 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. That full justice has never been done to the Phoenicians is partly their own fault. They were moved neither by the passion for truth nor by that for beauty ; they cared only for gain, and thanks to the condition of the world at the time they entered upon the scene, they could satisfy that lust to the full. In the barter trade they carried on for so many centuries the advantage must always have been for the more civilized, and the Phoenicians used and abused that advantage. Tyre and Sidon acquired prodigious wealth ; the minds of their people were exclusively occupied with the useful ; they were thinking always of the immediate profit to themselves in every transaction ; and to such a people the world readily denies justice, to say nothing of indulgence. But the historian must show himself more cool and more impartial. He must bring into the light the real services rendered to humanity even by the most un- lovable race. No doubt it may be said that it was quite without their goodwill that the Phoenicians helped other nations to shake off barbarism and to supply themselves with the material of civilized life. That, of course, is true, but it does not diminish the importance of the results obtained through their means. Phoenicia appropriated for herself all the inventions and recipes of the old eastern civilizations and by more than one happy discovery, and especially by the invention of the alphabet, she added to the value of the treasure thus accumulated. Whether she meant it or not, she did, as a fact, devote her energies to the dissemination of all this precious knowledge from the very day on which she entered into relations with those tribes on the Grecian islands and on the continent of Europe which were as yet strangers to political life. As soon as the sail and the oar had united coasts that had previously been held apart by an impassable sea, the work of universal civilization began, and the Phoenicians were the first to touch the shores on which the ancestors of Greece and Rome were yet at the age of stone. The seamen of Tyre and Carthage, the Hannos, Himilcars, and a crowd of others whose names have long ago been forgotten, played on the narrow stage of the Mediterranean and the threshold of the Atlantic a part analogous to that of the great voyagers of later centuries, of those who discovered America and Australia, of the missionaries who have buried themselves among savage tribes, and of those indomitable explorers who are now spending their lives in laying bare the interiors of unknown continents to the civilization of modern Europe.