10 Making of the Complete Citizen
No nation surpasses the United States in the scale on
which its institutions have equipped expeditions to excavate
old sites of buried civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, as
well as in the Americas. Probably by no university of the
world have the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations been
investigated with such resources as by the University of
Chicago. All this expenditure of money and intelligent
effort is striking proof that in our New World the force
of tradition and belief in its present value are widespread.
No civilized people can live to itself. Even oriental nations
have absorbed much from the West, not always to their
advantage; and western nations have drawn largely on the
culture of the East. But both these sections of the world
have their own traditions and principles of culture which
are “classical” for them. By “classical” is meant that they
belong to the highest class in their several branches, whether
literature, painting, sculpture, or other forms of art; and
as such they form the standards of excellence for taste.
These standards are of the essence of and give vitality to
tradition. Our western culture as distinguished from the
oriental has taken its ideals to a large extent from the classi-
cal tradition which derives from ancient Greece and Rome.
There are indeed in our national cultures many original
products in literature and art which are of such excellence
as to deserve to be called classical, but they owe a great
deal to the earlier classics, and in so far as they are the
product of recent nationality they are less universally ac-
cepted than those of Greece and Rome. In those classics
there is no mere agglomeration of material handed down
indiscriminately because it happened to come from that
world; they have been transmitted not by chance but be-
cause the ages would not let them go; they are the gold
which has been left in the sieve after many Crushings and