unknown, which we call religion. There is the attempt at the
beautification of life, which we call art. There is the institution of
property. There is the institution of marriage. There is the demand for
the purity of woman. There is the insistence upon certain decencies and
certain conformities which constitute what is known as morality. There
is the exchange of material conveniences called commerce, with its
necessary adjunct, the sanctity of obligation. In a word, there are the
universal and eternal verities.

Farther, if what we may call the constitution of civilization is thus
definite, its physical limits are even more clearly defined.
Civilization is a matter of centers. The world is not large, and its
government rests upon the shoulders of the few. The metropolis is the
index of capacity for good and ill in a national civilization. Its
culture is representative of the common life of town and country.

It follows that the history of civilization is a history of the famous
gathering-places of men. The story of human progress in the West is the
story of Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Cnossus, Athens, Alexandria,
Rome, and of medieval, Renaissance, and modern capitals. History is a
stream, in the remoter antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia confined
within narrow and comparatively definite banks, gathering in volume and
swiftness as it flows through Hellenic lands, and at last expanding into
the broad and deep basin of Rome, whence its current, dividing, leads
away in various channels to other ample basins, perhaps in the course of
time to reunite at some great meeting of waters in the New World. To one
afloat in the swirl of contradictory eddies, it may be difficult to
judge of the whence and whither of the troubled current, but the ascent
of the stream and the exploration of the sources of literature and the
arts, of morals, politics, and religion, of commerce and mechanics, is