Free Ariel by Jose Enrique Rodo Page A

race.
    Still, the dispassionate study of that civilization which some would offer to us as a model, affords a reason no less potent than those which are based only on the indignity and unworthiness of mere imitation to temper the enthusiasm of those who propose it as our model.... And now I come to the very theme of my discourse, and the relation to it of this spirit of imitation. Any severe judgment formed upon our neighbours of the North should begin, like the courteous fencer, by lowering a rapier in salute to them. Easy is this for me. Failure to recognize their faults does not seem to me so insensate as to deny their qualities. Born — to employ Beaudelaire’s paradox — with the innate experience of liberty, they have kept themselves faithful to the law of their birth; and have developed, with the precision and certainty of a mathematical progression, the fundamental principles of their organization. This gives to their history a unity which, even if it has excluded the acquirement of different aptitudes or merits, has at least the intellectual beauty of being logical. The traces of its progress will never be expunged from the annals of human right, because they have been the first to evoke our modern ideal of liberty and to convert it from the uncertainty of experiment and the visions of Utopia into imperishable bronze and living reality. For they have shown by their example the possibility of extending the immovable authority of a republic over an immense national commonwealth, and, with their federal organization, have revealed — as de Tocqueville felicitously put it — the manner in which the brilliancy and power of great states may be combined with the felicity and peace of little ones....
    Theirs are many of the most daring deeds for which the perspective of time shall distinguish this century; theirs is the glory of having revealed completely the greatness and dignity of labour, thereby accentuating the firmest note of moral beauty in all our civilization; that blest force which antiquity abandoned to the abjection of slavery, and which to-day we identify with the highest expression of human dignity, based on the consciousness and the exertion of its own merit. Strong, tenacious of purpose, holding inaction as opprobrious, they have placed in the hands of the mechanic of their shops and the farmer of their fields the mystic key of Hercules, and have given to human genius a new and unwonted beauty, girding it with the leathern apron of the handworker. Each one of these presses on to conquer life as his Puritan ancestors did the wilderness. Persistent followers of that creed of individual energy which makes of every man the artificer of his destiny, they have modelled their commonwealth on a kind of imaginary population of Crusoes, who, as soon as they have roughly attended to their training in the art of taking care of themselves, will turn to the making of themselves into a stable State. And, never sacrificing to this their conception of the sovereign Individual, they yet have known how at the same time to make of their association the most admirable instrument of their grandeur and empire; they have got from the sum of their energies, as devoted to research, industry, philanthropy, results that are the more marvellous in that they were secured with the most absolute integrity of their personal liberty.
    They have a sleepless and insatiable instinct of curiosity, an impatient eagerness for the light; and, carrying a fondness for public education almost to the point of monomania, have made the common school the surest prop of their prosperity, believing that the mind of the child should be the most cherished of their precious things. Their culture, while far from being spiritual or refined, has an admirable efficiency so far as it is directed to practical ends and their immediate realization. And, while they have not added to the acquisitions of science a single general law, one new principle, they have done