kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those
of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak--the dreams, the plans,
the hopes and aspirations--are assuredly ours also, the stuff and
substance of our being, our inner _genius_, our guiding and controlling
selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we
believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed.
If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are
small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by
professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which
is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with
other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving,
deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe
and the world.

In most of us at all times, and in all of us at most times, these
influences and their operations lie deep below the threshold of
consciousness, some of them deeper than any plummet of self-analysis can
sound. They are also the unseen foundations of the social and political
superstructure in which we live. Or, to use another figure, they form
the fertile soil in which we, with all our activities and institutions,
are rooted and from which we draw no small part of our spiritual
sustenance. Hence it is highly pertinent here and now to examine them,
for in this identity of foundation is to be found the primary unity of
the now diffused life of Europe which has parted into so many and so
widely divergent currents of national life. We all come spiritually from
the same ancient home, and it is well and wise to recall its memories.
So we and others shall be the more disposed to re-knit the old bonds and
to weave new ones which may one day restore on a grander scale, in more