If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the 'Marseillaise.' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.
Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the world.

But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of Pericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother of the dead.
In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have been the successive creations of new moral entities--of such ideals as justice, freedom, right.

In their origin that process of conscious logical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the historical fact.

We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the conversations in which Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effective political term.

It is certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of conscious thought.