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Yet more is the analogous fact true with regard to human beings. Alone and divided from his fellows, the individual man is capable of only the very lowest form of development. The accounts of persons who have been lost in infancy and grown up alone, apart from any organization or interaction with their fellows, shows in the extremest form how very low is the natural condition of the human amœboid. Speechless, knowledgeless, its very hands incapable of performing the simplest operation which the veriest child in the lowest organized society learns to perform (as we imagine intuitively), such an individuality impresses on us, in its extremest form, a lesson which all human history teaches us in other shapes.

Great men, great actions, great arts, great developments, are impossible without those closely united, interacting organic combinations of men which we call nations, using that word in its largest sense, and to include all organized, centralized, interacting masses of humans and to exclude such as are inorganic and only united in name or by force. The organically united nation is the only known matrix in which the human being can attain to full development. A Plato, an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, implying as much the existence of a Greece, an England, or an Italy, are as impossible without them as an eye or brain imply and would be impossible without a whole human organism. They are the efflorescence of the nations.