Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

Ancient Rome And Modern America

A Comparative Study Of Morals And Manners

By

Guglielmo Ferrero

Author Of “The Greatness And Decline Of Rome,” Etc.

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press

Copyright, 1914

By

Guglielmo Ferrero

Third Impression

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

Publisher’S Note

The reader will find in the following pages reference to another work by Dr. Ferrero which will shortly come into publication under the title of _Between the Old World and the New_. It is in order to explain that _Between the Old World and the New_ was brought into print in continental editions (in Italy, in France and elsewhere) before the publication of the present work. The author has, however, decided, that for the English-speaking readers of the two volumes it would be advisable to change the order of publication and to issue first this study of Morals and Manners. The second book, _Between the Old World and the New_, will appear, in New York and in London, early in the autumn of 1914.

NEW YORK, _April, 1914_.

Contents

Page _Part One_

What Is Progress? 3

_Part Two_

Ancient History And The Modern World

Chapter I. Ancient Social Systems And Contemporary America 21

II. Quantity And Quality 40

III. Woman And Home 60

IV. The Lesson Of The Fall Of The Roman Empire 77

V. Ups And Downs 97

_Part Three_

Europe And America

I. The American Definition Of Progress 115

II. Facts And Motives In The Modern World 139

III. More Or Better? 161

IV. The Lost Paradise Of Beauty 182

V. Beyond Every Limit 201

VI. The Riddle Of America 223

_Part Four_

Politics And Justice In Ancient Rome

I. The Trial Of Verres 251

II. The Trial Of Clodius 275

III. The Trial Of Piso 299

_Part Five_

The Limit Of Sport 331

Ancient Rome And Modern America

Part I

What Is Progress?

What Is Progress?

The object of the essays collected in this volume, with the exception of three which recount three curious episodes in Roman history, is the investigation of the most important differences between the ancient world and the modern, between Europe and America; in what way and in what particulars the civilisations of the ancients and of Europe have been modified respectively by the course of centuries and by the passage of the Atlantic. The essays were printed in the first instance in a monthly publication—_Hearst’s Magazine_—for the perusal of the multitude of hasty readers who are content to skip from argument to argument, and they are now republished in book form for the benefit of those readers who may care to dwell on each argument with greater deliberation. This volume may be considered as the bridge which connects the _Greatness and Decline of Rome_ with a third work which, under the title of _Between the Old World and the New_, will be published shortly in New York and London.

A comparison between the ancient world and the modern, between Europe and America, suggested to a writer of ancient history by two long tours in the New World—such is the subject of this volume; and such is the subject of the further book which at an early date will again take up a number of the matters outlined in these papers and will submit these to more exhaustive consideration. But neither in this volume nor in its successor must the reader expect the comparison to resolve itself into a definite judgment; and if he imagines that he has discovered such a verdict, he may rest assured that he is mistaken. This book, and the other which will follow it, have been written with the express purpose of emphasising how vain it is to spend our time, as we do, passing judgment on the progress or decadence of the times, of nations, and of civilisations; of showing how easy it is to reverse all the reasonings by which, impelled by passions, interests, prejudices, or illusions, we strive now to exalt, now to abase ourselves by comparison with the ancients and by contrasting the inhabitants of one continent with those of another; of indicating what an easy and sure target irony and dialectic have in all the doctrines, opinions, and beliefs with which man endeavours to establish his by-no-means sure judgments—all the doctrines, including that of progress, at least in the sense in which progress is generally understood.

Including that of progress? the American reader will exclaim, with some misgiving. But are we not living in the age of progress? Can that idea of progress which every morning rises with the sun and sheds new splendour on the two worlds on either side of the Atlantic, and with the sun arouses them to their accustomed tasks—can it be that this idea is but an illusion? No. The author of these two books has not so much confidence in his own wisdom as to try to discover whether man is really progressing or not; whether he is moving down the valley of the centuries towards a fixed goal, or towards an illusion which retreats with each step he takes in its direction. There is one point only which the author proposes to make clear. There are at the present day, on the one hand, those who despise the present and worship the past, extol Europe and depreciate America; on the other hand, those who declare that they would not give one hour of the marvellous present in which they live for all the centuries of the past, and who rate America far more highly than they do Europe. The author sets out to show that the reason why the eternal disputes between the partisans of these divergent views are so inconclusive, is that in this discussion, as in so many others, each side postulates two different definitions of progress, and in their discussions of the past and of the present, of Europe and of America, they start from this dual definition as if it were single and agreed. The result is that they cannot understand and never will understand, if they discuss for a thousand years, each other’s point of view.

The worshippers of the present and the admirers of America argue, more or less consciously, from a definition of progress which would identify it with the increase of the power and speed of machines, of riches, and of our control over nature, however much that control may involve the frenzied squandering of the resources of the earth, which, while immense, are not inexhaustible. And their arguments are sound in their application to the present age, and also to America, if we grant that their definition of progress is the true one. For though steam- and electricity-driven machinery claims Europe as its birthplace, it has reached maturity and has accomplished and is accomplishing its most extraordinary feats in America, where, so to speak, it found virgin soil to exploit. But the opposite school indignantly denies that men are wasting their time and contributing nothing to the improvement and progress of the world, when they strive to embellish it or to instruct it, to soothe and to restrain its unbridled passions. In their view, the masterpieces of art, the great religions, the discoveries of science, the speculations of philosophy, the reform of laws, customs, and constitutions, are milestones along the road to progress. According to these, our age, intent only on making money, ought to be ashamed when it compares itself with the past. Machines are the barbarians of modern times, which have destroyed the fairest works of ancient civilisations. History will show the discovery of America to have been little less than a calamity.

So two persons who, starting from these two definitions of progress, set to work to judge the past and the present, Europe and America, will never succeed in understanding each other, any more than two persons who, wishing to measure a thing together, adopt two different measures. And the discussion will be the more vain and confused, the less clearly and precisely the thought of each disputant apprehends the primary definition of progress, which does duty as a measure for each. Indeed, this unfortunate state of affairs is commoner than is generally supposed at the present day, with the need for hurry which pursues us in every act and at every moment, and with the great whirl of ideas and words which eddies around us. To decide, then, whether our times are or are not greater than those of the ancients, whether America is superior to Europe or Europe to America, we must discover which of these two definitions is the true one. But is it possible to prove that one of these definitions of progress is true and the other false? How many to-day would dare to deny that man made the world progress when, by the use of fire, he launched on the path of victory the locomotive across the earth and the steamer across the ocean? Or when he captured and led through threads of copper the invisible force of electricity adrift in the universe? Or when he embellished the world with arts, and enlightened it with studies, and tempered the innate ferocity of human nature with laws, religion, and customs? It is clear that neither of these two definitions will succeed in putting the other out of court, until men are willing either to superhumanise themselves completely, renouncing material goods in favour of spiritual joys, or, sacrificing the latter to the former, to bestialise themselves. So long as men with few exceptions continue to desire riches and the control of nature, as well as beauty, wisdom, and justice, both these definitions of progress will be _partially_ true. Each will present to us one aspect of progress. It will be impossible, if we adopt only one of the two, to decide whether we are progressive or decadent, whether America is worth more or less than Europe. Every epoch and people will seem at one time and another to be progressive or decadent, to be superior or inferior, according as the one or the other definition is the basis of judgment.

“But,” the reader will say, “why not then combine the two definitions in one? Why not say that progress is the increase of all the good things which man desires: of riches, of wisdom, of power, of beauty, of justice?” But in order to make of these two definitions a single complete and coherent definition, we should have to be certain that it is possible by a single effort to increase all the good things of life. Is it possible, and to what extent is it possible? That is a second grave question which this book and its successor endeavour to answer.

Many and various matters relating to Europe and America are discussed in this book. Still more various and diverse are the discussions in _Between the Old World and the New_, which presents a series of dialogues occupying the leisure hours of a two weeks’ voyage, in the course of which persons of different degrees of culture and diverse casts of thought discuss Hamlet and progress, machinery and Homer, the Copernican system and riches, science and Vedanta philosophy, Kant and love, Europe and America, Christian Science and sexual morality. These matters are discussed fitfully with mad rushes zigzag over the universe; and the fits and rushes have somewhat dismayed certain critics on this side of the Atlantic. “What a jumble!” they cry. “What an encyclopædia, what an enormity it is! What can Homer and machinery, Hamlet and America, Copernicus and emigration have in common?”

In short, the perusal of _Between the Old World and the New_ in the original Italian has produced upon more than one critic the same effect as if he had come back to his house to find all his belongings, his letters, his furniture, his clothes, shifted and turned upside down. “What demon has been at work here?” he cries in dismay. Such critics are not altogether wrong from their point of view. Nevertheless, this demon, which is always urging man to turn his home upside down in the hopes of arranging it better, no adjuration will succeed in exorcising from our epoch. I hope that, when presented in the form of a book, these dialogues will produce a less alarming impression on America. Accustomed as she is to seeing such demons raging in her house, she should not permit herself to be prevented from taking breath in the satisfaction of having done well, by the ambition to do better. To be sure, between the so-called Homeric question and steam-engines, between the discovery of America and the tendencies of philosophy, between the troubles which torment us in private life and the French Revolution, between transatlantic emigration and the architecture of New York, there is a connection. It is a profound, an organic, a vital connection; for, in the last four centuries, little by little, almost imperceptibly at first, then with a speed which increased gradually up to the French Revolution, finally, at headlong speed from the Revolution to the present day, the world has changed in every part, in form, spirit, and order. And it has changed in form, order, and spirit, because it has changed the order of its demands upon man. In compensation for the liberty granted him in everything else, it has demanded of him a rapidity, a punctuality, an intensity, and a passivity of obedience in his work, such as no other epoch has ever dreamed of being able to exact from lazy human nature.

From the French Revolution onwards, throughout Europe and throughout America, the political parties, the social classes, and institutions, and the philosophical doctrines which supported the principle of authority, little by little, but everywhere and unintermittently, have given way before the onslaught of the parties, the classes, and the doctrines which support the principle of liberty. The former have been forced sooner or later to allow the right of free criticism and discussion to oust the ancient duty of tacit obedience in the state, in religion, in the school, and ultimately in the family. Poets and philosophers have extolled the liberation of man from ancient servitudes as the most glorious victory man can vaunt. A victory, certainly; but over whom? Over himself, as it seems; since the limits, within which man was content to rest confined until the French Revolution, he himself had erected and invested with sacred terrors. It is clear that the slave, the tyrant, and the liberator were one and the same person. Moreover, one may well think that, in gaining his liberty, man has not been born again to a new destiny nor has he regenerated his own nature; rather has he learned to employ his own energies in a different way. Man had lived for centuries within strict limits, which confined in a narrow compass his curiosity, ambition, energy, and pride. But within those limits he had lived with greater comfort and less anxiety than we are living, without racking his brains to invent or to understand something new every day, not spurred on every hour to produce at greater speed and in greater abundance, not exasperated by the multitude of his needs nor agitated from morning to night by the pursuit of the means to satisfy them. But after the discovery of America and the first great astronomical discoveries which shed glory on the beginning of the sixteenth century, there arose in man the first sparks of ambition to seek new ways in the world outside the ancient limits. The philosophies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and still more the first discoveries of science, lent boldness to these ambitions. One day men realised that Prometheus, that clumsy thief, had stolen from the gods only a tiny spark of the fire. They planned a second robbery, discovered coal and electricity, and invented the steam-engine. And behold! the French Revolution, which confounded and upset, from one end of Europe to the other, boundaries, laws, institutions, and traditions—ideal and material limits. Then at last man realised that he could conquer and exploit the whole earth with iron and fire. At the same time as liberty, a new, untiring, formidable eagerness invaded the two worlds. All the limits which, for so many centuries, had confined in a narrow circle the energy and aspirations of even the most highly venerated of men fell one after the other to the ground. They fell, because the human mind could not have launched out into the unknown to essay so many new marvels if those ancient limits which imprisoned it had remained standing. The multitude would not have bowed their necks to the hard discipline of their new work, if in compensation they had not been liberated from other, more ancient, disciplinary restrictions.

In short, the great era of iron and fire began, in which the principle of liberty was destined to assault the principle of authority in its last entrenchments, and to drive it right away to the farthest frontiers of political, moral, and intellectual anarchy. But for this very reason the era of iron and fire has seen the gradual confusion and reduction to wavering uncertainty of all the criteria which served to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, good from evil. These criteria have become confused because they are and can be nothing else but limits; limits which are precise and sure so long as they are restricted, but become feeble the more they are enlarged. But how can a century, which has made itself so powerful by dint of overturning the ancient limits on every hand, be expected to respect these limits in the spiritual world? As a result we find a civilisation which has built railways, studded the Atlantic with steamers, exploited America, and multiplied the world’s riches a hundredfold in fifty years,—we find it obsessed by grotesque doubts and eccentric uncertainties with regard to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, in which generation after generation, accustomed to respect amongst other limits those imposed by literary traditions, had unhesitatingly agreed to recognise two masterpieces composed by a poet of genius. So we see the epoch which has overturned and destroyed so many thrones and altars and made Reason and Science march in triumph through the smoking ruins of a score of revolutions,—we see it obsessed on a sudden by a thousand scruples, halt, ask itself what is truth, whether it exists, and if it can be recognised. We see it rack its brains to decide whether what we know is a real and objective something or only a creation of our fancy. All these scruples and doubts are, as it were, the brow of a slope down which our epoch slides at headlong speed towards the abyss of nothingness. And in the century which has given man liberty, the certainty of food, comfort in abundance, and so many guarantees against the oppression of individuals and authorities as were known to no previous century; in the century which, by overthrowing so many limits, has banished from our midst so many reasons for hatred and war, do we not hear a thousand voices on every side cursing man for a miserable slave and accusing the times of being corrupt; crying that conditions must be purified with fire and sword, according to some, with war, according to others, with revolution? Having once transgressed the limits, man has become insatiable. The more he possesses, the more he wants. He no longer acknowledges any restraint in his desires.

The quantity which vanquishes quality, the liberty which vanquishes authority, the desires which blaze out anew each time they are satisfied—these are the forces and the phenomena which shape and fashion our civilisation. For this reason we can, it is true, accumulate vast hordes of wealth and conquer the earth with iron and fire. But we must resign ourselves to living in a new Tower of Babel, in the midst of a confusion of tongues. The æsthetic, intellectual, and moral confusion of our times is the price nature exacts for the treasures which she is obliged to resign into our power. This book and its successor have been written with the object of throwing light on the obscure but vital bond which links together in a living unity the most diverse phenomena of contemporary life. They have not been written, as some have thought, with the view of comparing the ancient and the modern civilisations, Europe and America, to the detriment of the one or of the other; much less with the view of denouncing the régime of liberty, on the ground that it corrupts the world, and of demanding that it be suppressed. To find fault with the tendency of a civilisation, one must postulate the fact that history has gone wrong. And what criterion, what standard is there which justifies a man in declaring to successive generations that they ought to have held different objects in view, and adopted other means to attain them?

No: the author’s only object has been to sound the depths of life, in the hope of tracing that unity from which flow forth and into which flow back again so many apparently diverse phenomena; that unity in which alone thought can find some respite from its weary search after the secret of its own being and of that of things in general. Without a doubt each one of us attains only provisional success in his search for this unity; but is not every work of man only provisional, and what are we but beings destined to live only for an instant? Therefore, I have endeavoured in this book to reveal, by way of an analytical and rational exposition, set out in the simplest and plainest terms, the vital bond of this unity. But, inasmuch as a unity is a synthesis, and analysis necessarily modifies and disfigures while trying to explain, I have availed myself in my other work of what is perhaps the most effective method of representing the phenomena of life in their synthesis: I mean, art. For this reason I have written a dialogue, in which I have made my characters begin by wandering haphazard over a wide field and jumping, apparently at random, from one to another of a series of widely different topics. But at the end the various topics are gathered into a united whole, showing the bond which unites them, in the speeches of the most acute and intelligent of the passengers; especially in that speech which coincides with the entry of the ship from the open Atlantic, the free high-road of the new world, into the Mediterranean, the confined arena of ancient civilisation. _Livre désordonné et pourtant bien ordonné_ is the verdict of a French critic, André Maurel. How glad I should be if all my readers subscribed to this verdict! In truth, this tragic conflict of the two worlds, of the two civilisations, of man with himself, for licence to dispense with the limits of which he, in fact, has need if he is to enjoy the most exquisite fruits of life, is a picture so vast as to overtax the resources of the painter. But the painter has worked at his canvas with so much ardour and passion that he hopes to find on the other side of the Atlantic, as on this, readers willing to view the defects in his work with the intelligent indulgence of which really cultured men are always so liberal; readers prompt to feel some quickening in response to the few sparks of beauty and of truth which the author may have succeeded in infusing into his work. It is a small thing, no doubt. But do not even the tiny rivulets which flow through the valleys unite to form the mighty rivers in the plain?

Part II

Ancient History And The Modern World

I

Ancient Social Systems And Contemporary America

At the end of the year 1906, while sojourning in Paris, where I had been giving at the Collège de France a course of lectures on Roman history, I received an invitation from Emilio Mitré, the son of the famous Argentine general, to undertake a long expedition to South America. This invitation evoked general surprise. What, my friends asked, was I, the historian of the ancient world, going to do in the newest of new worlds, in ultra-modern countries, in countries without a past and caring only for the future, where industry and agriculture fill the place which for the ancients was occupied by war? Why, if I was willing to leave my studies and my books for one moment, did I not repair to Egypt or the East, the scene of so much of the history which I had recounted, where the Romans have left so many traces of the world which has passed away, and where so many important excavations, tending to enrich history with new documentary evidence, are in progress?

I answered my questioners by pointing out that I was not a bookworm, whose interest was confined to ancient books and archæological parchments; that life in all its aspects interested me, and that I was, therefore, curious, after devoting so much attention to ancient peoples, to study awhile the most modern of nations, the newest comers in the history of our civilisation. Did my friends suppose that, because I had written a history of Rome, I had pledged myself never again to direct my gaze to modern life? But, though I explained the reason for my voyage in this way, I, no less than my friendly objectors, was convinced at that time that my travels in America would be only a parenthesis in my intellectual life. In other words, I thought that I was going to America in search of an intellectual diversion, hoping for some relaxation for my mind, obsessed for the last ten years by ancient history, in bringing it to bear on an entirely different world. That this diversion would be useful to me, I had no doubt; but not because America might help me to a better understanding of ancient Rome, but because to change every now and again the subject-matter of my studies and to enrich my mind with new impressions always seemed to me one of the most profitable intellectual exercises, especially for a historian to whom a wide experience of human nature is a necessity. To-day, after having made not one, but two journeys to America, after having seen not only the two largest and most flourishing states of South America, but also that North America which, more than all the other states of the New World, represents in the eyes of contemporaries the more modern part of our civilisation, the reign of machinery, the empire of business, the rule of money, I am no longer of this opinion. It is my present belief that a journey in the New World is of supreme benefit intellectually to a historian of the ancient world; and that, in order to understand the life and history of Greek or Roman society, it is perhaps just as important to visit the countries of America as Asia Minor or Northern Africa. That is what I said on one of the last days of my stay in the United States to a genial professor of ancient history connected with Cornell University, with whom I was discussing the most famous schools of the present day for the pursuit of historical studies, and the methods adopted in these schools. “Many of you Americans,” I said, “go to European universities to study ancient history. It seems to me that you might well invite many European professors to come and go through a finishing course in America, studying not only in libraries but in the live world, and observing what happens in American society. Nobody is in a better position than are you to understand ancient society.” My remark may seem at first sight a paradox. But it is no paradox, if one goes to the root of the problem. For what we, men of the twentieth century, call ancient civilisations, were really, when they flourished, new and young civilisations, with but few centuries of history behind them; and so are the American civilisations of the present day. For this reason, we find in ancient civilisations, on however much reduced a scale, many phenomena which are now peculiar to American social systems; while we should look for them in vain in European civilisation, which has more right to call itself ancient civilisation than have the civilisations of Greece and of Rome. This I propose briefly to prove.

One of the social phenomena which are most characteristic of North America, but which would be looked for in vain in Europe, is the munificence of the donations of wealthy men to the public. Families of great wealth in America nowadays feel it incumbent on them, as a social duty, to spend a part of their substance on the people; to encourage education and culture, to bestow benefactions, to help the more needy classes, and to assist with their purses the public authorities in the execution of their functions. In Europe, the case is different. Large fortunes may be numerous, but they are kept more in the background than in America. Rich men are much more selfish in the enjoyment of their riches. Even the richest are, as a rule, content to leave some small sum in their wills to the poor, or to some educational institution. But donations in excess of four thousand pounds are rare, and make a great stir. It is for this reason that certain sections of society in Europe accuse the upper classes of selfishness and hold up before them American generosity as an example to follow. But this censure is exaggerated, for the times and the social conditions are different in Europe. The history of the ancient world shows that this generosity on the part of the rich is a phenomenon peculiar to a certain stage in the development of society, which recurs in all flourishing and prosperous, but as yet not very ancient, societies. In these, some of the public functions are assumed by the rich, because the State has not yet had the time to bring them under its control and to direct them according to laws by it established. If the millionaires of America have, as a matter of fact, but few imitators in Europe, they can boast numberless forerunners in the histories of Greece and Rome. In Athens to begin with, and, later, in the Roman Empire, to mention only the most famous states of the ancient world, education, charity, public amusements, even public works, such as roads, theatres, and temples, were always in part left by the State to the generosity of wealthy individuals, who felt it their duty to contribute out of their means to the public welfare.

Amongst the inscriptions which have reached us from the Roman world, and which have been collected in the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, we find a considerable number referring to these donations. In all the provinces of the vast Empire, in all the cities great and small, stories have been found recounting, often in forcible terms, the donation by some citizen, during his life or at his death, of a certain sum to the city, it might be to construct or repair an edifice, it might be to distribute grain to the people in time of dearth, or to give bounties of oil on festive occasions, or to assure to the people the enjoyment of certain periodical spectacles, or to supplement the finances of the city, which had been thrown into disorder by excessive expenditure, or which were not equal to all the calls made upon them. Every city, then, had her own millionaire benefactors, her little Carnegies, her Huntingtons, Morgans, and Rockefellers in miniature, whose generosity was necessary to the public good, and to whom were raised in gratitude monuments, many of which have come down to our time.

The Roman Emperor himself was, at first at any rate, only the most generous and the best known of these rich donors: a kind of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller of the Empire. Suetonius, for instance, tells us what sums Augustus spent in the course of his life, out of his private patrimony, on public objects. Augustus himself, in the famous _Monumentum Ancyranum_, the great inscription found in Asia, in which he gives a clear résumé of the story of his life, enumerates many of the gifts which he made to the public out of his own pocket. On several occasions, he simply liquidated the deficit in the Empire’s budget out of his private purse. At another time, he repaired at his own expense the roads of Italy which after the civil wars had through neglect fallen into disrepair. On countless occasions, he spent money for public works, for the relief of famine, for popular amusements, for all the forms of beneficence then customary, without paying any regard to the serious inroads he was making on the fortune which he would have to leave to his own heirs. This is exactly what many wealthy men are doing to-day in the New World. It would be in accord with the facts to say that those striking largesses were one of the means by which imperial authority was gradually concentrated at the heart of the Roman State, and surrounded itself with so much gratitude, so many interests, and so many hopes as to be able definitely to secure the principal position amongst all the organs of the State.

But if the Emperor was the most generous of the public benefactors, he was not the only one. The chief men throughout the Empire followed his example, some of them on so elaborate a scale as to challenge comparison with the most munificent American millionaires, when account is taken of the difference in the standards of riches in the respective epochs. The best-known figure among these donors is Herodes Atticus, an immensely rich Athenian of the second century A.D. What was his origin, and whence he got his money, we do not know. Probably he belonged to one of those families which had accumulated immense property in the provinces, during the first century of the Christian era, a century of rapidly acquired and great fortunes. This much is certain, that he applied himself to study, and became what was then called a rhetor, corresponding more or less closely to what we term a professor of literature, not however with a view to earning a livelihood, but with the object of cultivating his own and other people’s minds. Highly cultured, erudite, and at the same time one of the richest men in the Empire, Herodes was a great friend of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Aurelius. But, great as was his reputation for wisdom and literary taste, and notwithstanding the enhancement of his prestige through the friendships of the two celebrated emperors, he left a name in the social history of the Roman world more particularly because of the vast sums he gave away all over the Empire. At Athens, he repaired in a splendid way the most ancient and famous buildings of that celebrated city. He presented, repaired, and maintained theatres, aqueducts, temples, and stadia in the cities of Greece and Italy.

For the rest, several of the most highly admired buildings and most imposing ruins in Rome are actually gifts made to the public by ancient citizens. Out of them all, I may cite the Pantheon, that marvellous Pantheon, which we all still admire in the heart of Rome, the monument which stands deathless while the stream of ages flows by. This was constructed by Agrippa, the friend of Augustus, at his own expense, and can be compared in this respect to Carnegie Hall in New York. Agrippa built the Pantheon from the same notions of civic zeal that impelled Carnegie to endow New York with his great Hall. And the two monuments, built by the personal munificence of two ultra-wealthy citizens, with an interval of twenty centuries between them, express the same desire to extend to the whole people a share in the enjoyment of the donor’s private fortune.

Naturally, my earliest studies in Roman history led me to fix my attention on this bountiful munificence on the part of private persons in the ancient world, by which the rich, either spontaneously or at the call of public opinion, took upon themselves a share of the public burdens. But I had not fully grasped the meaning of this system, until I visited America, and saw the colleges, schools, and hospitals founded and subsidised, the museums and universities endowed, and all the other public institutions aided with millions of dollars by the rich business men and bankers of America. For Europeans, living on a continent where nowadays the State has almost monopolised these functions and exercises them zealously, seeming to resent the interference of private persons, it is difficult to picture correctly a social system in which private generosity is at once possible and necessary, the advantages by which such generosity is accompanied, and the manner in which it is exercised.

* * * * *

The munificence of the wealthy citizens is only a special instance of a more general and more extensive phenomenon in which America approaches more nearly to the ancient world than Europe; I mean, in that her society is less essentially bureaucratic. In the ancient world, there was no bureaucratic organisation in any of the Greco-Asiatic monarchies founded by Alexander or in the latest period of the Roman Empire which could be considered to resemble even remotely, on a smaller scale and merely in broad outlines, that which flourishes in the Europe of to-day. Now, in the most splendid moments of Greek and Roman history, we find states in which all the public functions, even the executive ones, were elective; so that they all changed periodically according to the whims of an electoral body. The need for technical training and professional education for the exercise of certain executive functions was so little recognised that even the command of the military forces and the chief magistracy were filled by public election. A general became a general, not in the course of his professional career, but at the will of the people, assembled in the _comitia_; and with generals chosen in this way, Rome conquered the world. It is impossible to imagine a social constitution in more striking contradiction to the social constitution of contemporary Europe, which entrusts all the executive functions to a bureaucracy professionally trained, formed into a rigid hierarchy, and dependent on the State, over which the people have practically no power. Men in Europe become generals or judges because they have studied the art of war or law in special schools, not because the majority of an electoral body have thought it opportune to entrust the office to an individual who has been clever enough to appeal to them more strongly than do his rivals.

This difference was and is one of the greatest difficulties met with by European historians in the study of the ancient world. I am of opinion, for example, that this is one of the weakest points in Mommsen’s history. Accustomed to see bureaucratic states at work, European historians find it difficult to imagine how those states can have prospered in which the magistrates changed periodically, sometimes every year, and in which there was no professional division between the different functions. Instinctively, they tend also to paint the ancient state in the colours of the European state, attributing to it the same virtues and the same defects, and, therefore, representing its weaknesses as well as its merits in a false light. For an American, on the other hand, especially for a North American, the difficulty of understanding the ancient states is much less formidable. Certainly the principle of professional specialisation is much more highly developed in modern American society than it was in the ancient societies. Modern civilisation is nowadays too complex and too technical to admit of the principle of popular election being applied indiscriminately, as at Athens or Rome, to all the public offices. What sensible man would consent to-day, even in the purest of democracies, to the election of the admirals, for instance, by universal suffrage? Nevertheless, in the American confederation many of the public offices, which are now entrusted in Europe to the professional bureaucracy, are elective. And this fact by itself is enough to represent a distinct _rapprochement_ between American society and ancient society.

For this reason, an inhabitant of New York can more easily than an inhabitant of London or Paris picture to himself certain aspects of the life of the Athens or Rome of ancient days; especially the continual and frequent succession of elections, and the complete change of interests and of directing forces involved in the change of the magistrates in office. It is true that we in Europe have periodical elections, as in America. Periodically, in the Old, as in the New World, the people assemble to exercise their sovereign right by means of the ballot. But if, regarded superficially, the act and the procedure are identical, their value and importance are different. The populace in the old states of Europe elect only consultative and legislative bodies, while the executive power remains to a great extent independent of the people, residing in a professional bureaucracy whose members cannot be changed from day to day.

In America, on the contrary, as in ancient Athens and Rome, many of the magistrates who hold in their hands and exercise directly governing powers are periodically changed at the will of the people, which, therefore, moulds more directly the government and its different organs and more directly inspires and controls its particular functions, just as it used to control them in the ancient states.

It is not strange, therefore, that we find ancient Rome reappearing in one of the most important juridical institutions of the United States, an institution which we should search for in vain in Europe, great mistress of laws though she be accounted. One of the American institutions which seems to Europeans most contrary to the modern spirit, and for that reason most deserving of severe blame, is the right of “injunctions” with which American magistrates are invested. To Europe, where the bureaucracy, though immovable and little subject to control, cannot step outside the precise prescriptions of the law in the exercise of its functions, this discretionary power of the American magistrates seems little less than an instrument of intolerable tyranny. A brilliant European, who is a distinguished professor of literature in one of the universities of North America, but who, notwithstanding a very lengthy sojourn in the American republic, has preserved intact the ideas and the spirit of the Old World, said to me one day in New York: “In this land of liberty, there is one tyranny more terrible than all the tyrannies of Europe, that of the judicial power!” That a magistrate should have the power to give orders, be they of only momentary validity, which are the expressions of his own will and not of the letter of the law, seems to the European a monstrous thing, a relic of the ancient tyrannies, which harmonises but ill with republican institutions.

A historian of the ancient world, on the other hand, is in a position to understand more easily this seeming contradiction. The injunction is nothing else than the _edictum_ of the Roman magistrate; the power, that is to say, which the Roman magistrate possessed, and which the American magistrate, maybe in a less degree, possesses, of making good with his personal authority the lacunæ and deficiencies in the law, on every occasion when public order or the principles of justice seemed to demand it urgently. In the eyes of ancient Rome, the magistrate was not only, as in the bureaucratic states of Europe, the cautious and impartial servant and executor of the law. He was also the living personification of the State and of the general interest, invested with full powers of exercising his own judgment, over and above the laws, on behalf of the State and of the general interest, when the law was found wanting. In short, by reinforcing the authority of the magistrates, the ancient states endeavoured to make amends for the weakening of the State which was bound to ensue from the continual electoral changes and the instability of all the offices; while Europe, on the other hand, which, with her rigid bureaucracies, has made the power of the State so strong, can rigorously limit the powers of her functionaries with laws of immense scope. But one last remnant of the ancient conception, tempered by the modern spirit of the State, survives in North America, where, the elective principle being more extensively applied than in the states of Europe, the tendency is, by way of compensation, to reinforce by some discretionary power, like the “injunction,” some at least of the judicial offices. Perhaps we may explain in this way the fact that some European writers in the nineteenth century have ventured to assert that the ancients never knew what liberty was, even in what were apparently the most democratic republics; while others have maintained that more liberty is to be found in the constitutional monarchies of Europe than in the authoritative American republics.

Another instance still more curious is afforded us by those dictators who, under varying titles and with varying success, have appeared in almost all the republics of Spanish America, after the emancipation of these territories from the mother country. The latest of these dictators was Porfirio Diaz, who governed Mexico for so many years. Europe has never properly understood these dictators. She has mistaken them for caricatures, now of Nero, now of Napoleon, and has drawn the conclusion that the republics in question were impregnated with the disease of tyranny, and could not exist in a state of liberty. But a historian of the ancient world recognises at once in these dictators a modern incarnation of a figure which constantly appears in ancient history, the Greek τύραννος, the Roman _princeps_. Pisistratus and Augustus, not Nero and Napoleon, are the prototypes of these dictators. States based on an electoral system which is not controlled by organised parties or by other social forces calculated to ensure its working in conformity with precise and certain rules, are subject to eruptions of disorder, which end in establishing the personal power of that individual who succeeds in making the political and administrative machine work with comparative regularity. Augustus was throughout forty-one years re-elected every five or ten years head of the republic, because he had succeeded, by his influence and personal ability, in making the machine of the _comitia_ and senate run smoothly, at a time when the Roman aristocracy, which had controlled it for centuries, could no longer, owing to its own discords, do so. The reason why the power of Augustus was prolonged and extended in all directions until it became a dictatorship for life, cloaked under legal forms, was that he alone seemed capable of ensuring a wise government and of preventing civil wars. And was not just this the real reason for the long tenure of power by Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and for his prolonged presidency, which was merely a dictatorship masquerading under republican forms? Anyone who wishes to understand the government of Mexico during the last forty years might find the history of Augustus of great service; just as a profound knowledge of the recent history of Mexico might help to the understanding of the ancient history of Augustus.

A profound study of ancient history is, therefore, an excellent preparation for the rapid understanding of certain parts, at any rate, of the American constitution and of American society; just as a knowledge of America should be an excellent aid to the study of ancient history. In fact, in the course of my travels and observations in America, after having devoted ten years to the study of a large section of ancient history, I have realised how much the ancient history, which I had studied in Europe, helped me to understand America; and how much the America which I had before my eyes helped me to a better understanding of the distant reality of that vanished world of long ago. And if we follow the track of these studies and reflections, I think that we shall be able to attribute also a more precise meaning to that epithet of “young,” which is constantly applied to America. Who does not talk a hundred times a year of old Europe and young America? Now what do these two much-used and much-abused epithets mean? That Europe has a longer history than America? In that case the contrasting terms would not mean much. For that is a simple chronological statement, which only demands a knowledge of the fact that America was not discovered till 1492 A.D. Do they mean that America is more vigorous, more active, more daring than Europe, just as young men usually possess these qualities in a greater degree than the old? As a matter of fact, many people do use the two adjectives in this sense. But, in that case, they assume as proved one of the most complex, one of the deepest and most difficult problems of modern life, that is to say, the problem whether a comparison can be struck between Europe and America, and if so, on the basis of what criterion? That there should be those who strike this comparison and resolve it in this way, is not surprising. But no one will be found to pretend that the judgment contained in those two words “young” and “old,” thus interpreted, can or ought to be accepted as true by everyone.

On the other hand, it is possible to agree on a more narrow and precise interpretation of these words; to say that America is young and Europe old, because America reproduces some of the characters and phenomena which we find in antiquity, that is to say, in the remotest epochs of our history. European civilisation, as the result of her migration to America, there to found new states and societies, has really become, in a certain sense, regenerated, because she has again become, in the light of certain characteristics and certain institutions, what she was twenty centuries ago. And if the “youth” of America is understood in this sense, it is not rash to argue that it too will grow old. The study of ancient history can be of a certain practical value to those who consider America with the object of divining, in this great community, the tendencies and inclinations of the future. For students of that history can bring a plausible criterion of prevision to their observations. In fact, it is not rash to suppose, at least if some unknown force does not unexpectedly divert the course of events in the New World, that all the parts of American life and society which most resemble ancient society are destined to disappear gradually, as America grows older and elaborates a complex and artificial civilisation; just as the ancient institutions and ideas of which we find so many traces in America gradually disappeared in Europe in the progress of time, as civilisation in the Old World became artificial and complex. If this prophecy is not fallacious, we should expect history, which eternally repeats herself, to require the man of the New World to witness the same phenomena whose more gradual realisation they have already witnessed in the ancient world. In the New World also, we should expect to see a society regulated by elective and authoritative institutions gradually become bureaucratic and at the same time fetter every branch of political and administrative powers with the tight bonds of rigid juridical principles. This will be a slow, but profound transformation, in the course of which many things will change their position and value. Perhaps the inexhaustible public munificence of the millionaires will become exhausted, and the State will grow in prestige and influence, if not in power.

II

Quantity And Quality

Suetonius recounts that one day a man presented himself to the Emperor Vespasian, and showed him the models of a machine, thanks to which the Emperor could have finished off the construction of certain of his great public works with fewer labourers, and at a great saving of expense. Vespasian was full of praise for the man’s ingenuity, and recompensed him with a sum of money; but he subsequently had the model destroyed, saying that he did not wish to have any machines which would cause his people to go hungry. Applying the standard of modern ideas, how should we judge this sentiment and act? Of course, we should consider it a strange and absurd mistake. Suetonius, on the contrary, quotes the incident to prove how wise Vespasian was. In this divergence of opinion is revealed the essential difference between ourselves and the ancients, between modern civilisation and Greco-Roman civilisation, for all that these resemble each other in so many particulars; the principal difference between the ancient world and America. Although, as I have shown in my preceding essay, America in certain of its institutions and forms of social life resembles the ancient world more than Europe, this comparison does not hold true so far as the instruments of economic production are concerned. In this respect America is much further removed from the ancient world than is Europe, and represents to-day the beginning of a new era and a new civilisation, whose spirit and tendencies would be quite incomprehensible to a re-embodied Greek or Roman.

Greco-Roman antiquity never dreamed that it might be a useful, beautiful, glorious work to invent machines of increasing speed and power, and therefore never gave a thought to those technical elaborations which are the pride of our times. It possessed the elementary machines, the lever, jack-screw, the inclined plane; but it never tried to combine these into more complicated machines. In particular, it never called into play the effort to which all the mechanism of modern times owes its birth; that is to say, it never tried to endow its machines with a more rapid motion than the muscles of men or of animals can endow them with, or to search nature for motive forces of greater power than these. It availed itself only sparingly and on rare occasions of the force of running water or of the wind. The latter it used only for navigation, and even then with regret, hesitation, and fear, as if it were doing an illicit and shameful thing. It knew of no combustible other than the wood of the trees. Notwithstanding the fact that Pliny the elder has preserved for us so much precious information about agriculture and the ancient arts and industries, his writings contain scarcely a single hint suggesting that the men of his civilisation had any desire to make the instruments of economic production more perfect and effective. In one place, the sail, as compared with the oar, inspires him to write a passage in which the modern reader imagines just at first that he has lighted on a sentiment containing a distant echo of contemporary enthusiasm for progress. “Is there a greater marvel in the whole world?” he writes.

A grass exists [flax, of which sails are made] which brings Egypt and Italy so close together that two prefects of Egypt, Galerius and Balbillus, crossed from Alexandria to the straits of Messina, one in seven days and the other in six; and that last summer the senator Valerius Marianus reached Alexandria from Pozzuoli in a light wind in nine days. There is a grass which brings me in seven days from Gades, the harbour near the Pillars of Hercules, to Ostia, in four from this side of Spain, in three from the province of Narbonne, in two from Africa, as C. Flavius, the envoy of the proconsul Vilius Crispus, found.

Does it not seem as if we were reading an anticipation by eighteen hundred years of that hymn which moderns so often raise to the power of steam and to the great ocean liners which cross the Atlantic in five or six days? But ours is only a brief illusion. The wonder and the admiration of Pliny are soon over, and a sort of awe takes their place. “_Audax vita, scelerum plena!_” he quickly adds. “Creature full of wicked daring!” The invention of sails seems to him almost a sacrilegious impiety, and his view was that of all the ancients.

In short, the few victories which the ancients had won over nature were to them a cause of embarrassment rather than of enthusiasm; for they saw in them merely a proof of the perversity and foolhardiness of human pride. If a contemporary of Sophocles or Horace came back to the world, he would probably just at first be terrified by what he saw all round him, as by the spectacle of a gigantic and unheard-of madness. Machinery, which to us seems the most marvellous instrument of our energy and intelligence, appeared to the ancients a danger, an enemy, and almost a sacrilege: an attempt to rebel against the gods and their wishes. Consequently, they invented and adopted machines—and those but simple and primitive ones—only for use in war, especially for siege-work. The necessity of conquering made them forget to some extent their usual fears.

So great a difference in thought and feeling, in a matter which to us seems of such vital importance, must arise from deep-seated causes. Why did the ancients invent and construct so few machines, and hold in such fear the few they had? Why did they wish the hand of man to be the principal and the most powerful among the instruments of production? Many attribute the inferiority of the ancients in this department to the comparatively undeveloped state of science. Vast and profound knowledge of science, they say, is required for the construction of modern machines. The ancients did not possess this knowledge; therefore, they conclude, they could not construct the machines.

But, in this deduction there are two exaggerations. The services of science, especially in early times, to machines and their progress, are exaggerated; so also is the scientific ignorance of the ancients. Science has helped materially to perfect certain machines, but has actually invented scarcely one. Many of the marvellous machines which, at a giddy rate, multiply riches all round us, have been conceived for the first time in the minds of artisans, _contre-maîtres_, managers of factories, and other persons more expert in practice than rich in scientific lore. The founder of the great mechanical industry, Arkwright, who invented the cotton-spinning machine, was a barber. Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, though perhaps a better-educated man than Arkwright, was not in any sense a great scientist. For the rest, whoever knows the history of machinery is aware that science did not begin to concern herself with machinery, or to inquire whether her studies might help inventors with useful suggestions, until the great mechanical industry had already invaded the world. Science, then, only followed a movement which had already begun, and did not give it the first impulse.

Furthermore, the scientific ignorance of the ancients is exaggerated. Ancient science is not so well-known as ancient art and literature; and it certainly did not make very striking progress during the last brilliant period of ancient history—the Roman Empire. Therefore to many, whose knowledge regarding it is comparatively superficial, the ancient world may seem empty of scientific wisdom. But such is not the case. If the Romans never applied much thought to the scientific study of nature, the Greeks for their part had laid the foundations of many sciences, and had laid them boldly and truly. Even the Copernican system had been anticipated by Greek astronomers, like Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia, who had maintained that the earth revolved round the sun, and that the firmament was much more vast than was generally supposed.

We need not, therefore, believe that the ancients were not able to construct more complicated machines than those they used, because they lacked scientific knowledge. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did not make much effort to raise sciences out of the necessarily narrow domain of purely theoretical problems, because, independent as they were of machinery, they had no need of the practical aids which science, if developed in certain directions, can lend to the construction of machines. In fact, we men of the present day encourage the sciences to search and investigate in every direction and to try every path, not from a disinterested love of the True nor from an intellectual curiosity to spy out the mysteries of nature; but because we hope that we shall discover, in the course of our all-embracing search, laws or bodies or forces which will help us to subdue and exploit nature.

The ancients then abstained from inventing and constructing machines, not from lack of knowledge but from lack of will. The effort seemed to them useless, nay, pernicious; and the enterprise did not attract them. It remains, therefore, to consider why the ancients, in their great struggle to extend the dominion of man over nature, felt no need of help from swift engines of iron, and, therefore, did not make the effort necessary to invent them. This is a question of the highest importance for the history of civilisation, for by its solution only can we gain an insight into what is perhaps the most profound difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The difference consists in this: while our civilisation is a mechanical-scientific civilisation, the ancient was above all things an artistic civilisation. Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in consumption, and therefore in production. If we are to grasp the very essence of our history, we must understand clearly how indisolubly united are the artistic civilisation and the ideal of a simple life, the mechanical-scientific civilisation and the ideal of a life of extravagance and luxury.

Even at the present day, many will be found to extol the greatness, the wealth, and the might of the Roman Empire as a marvel never surpassed in history. But this is a delusion. The Roman Empire seemed marvellously wealthy and powerful to the ancients, because they had never yet seen greater wealth and greater might. But what are the wealth and the might of the Roman Empire compared with the might and the wealth of the great modern states of Europe and America? One observation will suffice to give an idea of the difference. We are justified in deducing from the great number of facts and data in our possession that in the most flourishing and wealthy centuries the budget of the Empire, the sum total, that is, of all the items of expenditure which the central government at Rome had to meet—expenditure on the most important public services of so immense an empire, which comprised the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa—fell short, far short, of the municipal budget of the city of New York. Only the man who is conversant with the customs of the past in their minutest details can fully estimate how much simpler, poorer, and more economical the civilisation of the ancients was than that which has permeated America and Europe since the invention of the steam-engine and electricity, when the riches of the New World, exploited intensively with the help of machinery, began to flood the earth.

Consuming little, and content with a life of simplicity and poverty, the ancients had no need to produce much or to produce at great speed. So they had no requirement for machines, whether steam- or electricity-driven. The few simple machines, which the hand of man or the muscular force of domestic animals can operate,—the domestic loom, the horse-propelled mill,—sufficed. Therefore, they had no need of science to help them to construct new machines of greater size and power. They had no need to work at high pressure. They could work slowly, with their hands and with a few simple instruments, and with them produce beautiful, accurate, and finished articles, which aspired to a lofty and difficult ideal of perfection. Accordingly, art occupied in the ancient world the position which science occupies in modern civilisation. It was not a refined luxury for the few, but an elementary and universal necessity. Governments and wealthy citizens were obliged to adorn their cities with monuments, sculptures, and pictures, to embellish squares, streets, and houses, because the masses wished the cities to be beautiful, and would have rebelled against an authority which would have them live in an unadorned city; just as nowadays they would rebel against a municipal authority which would have them dwell in a city without light, or against a government which placed obstacles and hindrances in the way of the construction of railways. In those times, the requirement was that everything, down to the household utensils, even of the most modest description and destined for the use of the poorer classes, be inspired with a breath of beauty. Anyone who visits a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, in which are exposed to view objects found in rich and highly cultivated districts,—that of Naples, for example, where so many objects excavated from the ashes of Pompeii are to be seen,—can easily convince himself of this curious phenomenon, and realise more vividly, by contrast, the carelessness, roughness, and commonplace vulgarity of the objects made by modern machinery. In short, if the quantity of the things produced by the industry of the ancients was small, for that very reason, and by way of compensation, their quality was refined and excellent.

The contrary is the case in the modern world. The quantity of the things which modern industry, thanks to electricity- and steam-driven machinery, produces, is prodigious. No century ever witnessed the realisation of the miracle of abundance in a more marvellous way. But the quality of the things suffers in consequence. The ugliness and the crude vulgarity of so many objects, which in much poorer times had an elegance and a beauty which have now vanished, are the price we pay for the abundance of our times. The necessities of man have increased beyond all measure, and to satisfy them lavish and rapid production is required. The need for rapid production accounts for the invention of so many machines. But it is not possible to secure the manufacture by rigid hands of iron of so many things at such speed, and at the same time to impart to them an exquisitely artistic appearance, revealing the personal excellence of the artist. It is as much as we can do to impart to them a coarse and rude appearance of beauty, with a few ornamentations copied casually from the beautiful things which our fathers succeeded in creating in poorer and less busy times. Machinery, driven by steam or electricity, has the advantage of speed over the hand of man. It can produce in the same time a much greater number of objects. For this reason it has triumphed in a time like ours, in which the increased necessities of the world demand an extraordinary growth in production. But the hand of man,—that living and mind-inspired machine,—if it cannot compete with machines of iron for speed, is alone capable of imparting to things that perfection, that grace, and that excellence of form which can fill us with a joy which is different from, but perhaps more intense than, that afforded by easy and coarse abundance.

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This contrast between ancient and modern times, between the civilisations which preceded the French Revolution and the modern American civilisation, should and would have received more attention than it has, had not the students of antiquity been too prone to lose their way in the maze of a dead erudition. We are proud of our wealth and power. We are proud of having extended our dominion over the whole planet, only a small part of which was known to the ancients, and that but vaguely. We are proud of having surprised so many of nature’s secrets, of having deciphered the mystery of so many laws, of having thrown light on so many lurking-places of disease and death, of having shaken ourselves free from so many vain fears which tormented our ancestors, of having released ourselves from so many yokes—political, moral, and intellectual—which used to weigh upon their necks. We feel ourselves strong, sure of ourselves and of our destiny as no men before us in history, in face of the blind forces of the Universe, so many of which we have subjected to our dominion and forced to serve our necessities, our ambitions, and our whims.

Nevertheless, in the midst of all this wealth, this power, and this knowledge, a dull sense of disquietude vexes men’s souls. Man is not yet content. Every day he finds new pretexts or motives for complaining. One of the most oft-repeated of these pretexts or motives is, that the world is becoming uglier. If in our cities any beautiful part remains, it is nearly always the old part. In the historical cities, the new parts are horrible, and form a strange contrast with the older. The altogether-new cities—especially those which have sprung up in the last century in America—appear to the artistic eye almost always like a sort of anteroom to the infernal regions. Architecture has become a mother of monsters. Sculpture and painting, which were once upon a time the two most select amongst the decorative arts, protected and pampered by the great ones of the earth and adored by the masses, are reduced to the necessity of employing a thousand artifices to extort orders out of the negligent malevolence of an epoch, whose ornaments and monuments seem an encumbrance and an excrescence rather than a beauty. There was a time when the dress of men and women was a work of art. At the present day, only that of women has preserved a certain artistic grace and beauty. Let us not dwell upon the countless other forms of ugliness which have invaded our houses with the furniture, the carpets, the candelabra, and the china.

The artistic mediocrity of our epoch is surpassed only by the superficiality and confusion of its tastes. Each succeeding year sees that which used to appear the height of elegance and beauty to its predecessors, despised, neglected, and forgotten. All the styles of the past and all the styles of the different countries swirl round us, before the fickle gusts of fashion. Every picture which excites admiration for a moment is quickly forgotten by the fickle taste of an age which ransacks every corner in search of the beautiful, because nowhere can the beautiful be found. Many ask themselves what is the origin of this strange corruption of taste and of the æsthetic sense. But no two people agree on the answer. This one attributes the degeneration to the decadence of traditions, and therefore proposes to open schools and to institute courses of instruction. That one, on the other hand, traces the responsibility to the lack of liberty afforded the public taste and the genius of the artists, a condition of things for which these same traditions are to blame. Such a one therefore inveighs against the schools and the rules of tradition, and would like to see them all swept away. Nobody can explain how it happens that so rich, so wise, and so powerful a civilisation does not succeed in being beautiful, and shows itself powerless to infuse a breath of beauty into anything it creates, be it big or little, into its cities or into the small objects of daily use.

But the history of civilisation explains this apparent mystery. A civilisation cannot deck itself with the most exquisite beauties of art, if it cannot persuade itself to live with a certain simplicity and to work with a certain deliberation. What kills art in our civilisation is the mad desire for wealth, the giddy increase of necessities, the universal craze for speed, the effort to multiply production, the general restlessness of body and mind. Beauty is not so simple and commonplace a thing as to admit of its examples being multiplied by machinery in furious haste. Whether in big things or in little, it can only be the result of a long and steady effort of the intellect and the will, which must be expressed at all costs through the medium of that living and marvellous machine, the human hand. If we wish to accumulate round us the wealth of the world at express speed, if we wish to produce and to consume with giddy rapidity, we must not be too exacting in our demands for quality and beauty in the things produced. We cannot have a great deal in this world, and have that great deal beautiful.

Therefore, speaking still more generally, we might say that in the ancient civilisation the dominant principle was quality, in the modern civilisation, on the other hand, quantity. In ancient times, the more cultured, powerful, and wealthy a nation became, the greater efforts it made to produce in every branch of human activity but few things, but to ensure the materialisation in those things of a difficult and lofty ideal of perfection which should find common acceptance and admiration. Men of our time, on the other hand, direct their efforts towards production in large quantities, and at great speed, and are proud of seeing their power and grandeur expressed in the formidable figures of modern statistics. That the goods produced are of deteriorating quality is of small account. Thus the ancient civilisations tended, so to speak, towards eternity, towards the manufacture of things which, if not eternal in the precise meaning of the word, should last a long time, should conquer the ages, and should succeed in conveying to distant posterity a supreme image of their past existence. In very truth, after numberless catastrophes and pillagings, the material remains of ancient civilisations, which are piously preserved to this day, are very numerous. Our age produces in great quantities, but maybe not a single one of the buildings and material objects produced by it in such abundance can hope to conquer the ages. Everything is precarious, ephemeral, destined to live a few months or a few years; destined to a premature death from the very first hour of its birth.

And this diversity crops up again in every branch of human activity; in industrial as in intellectual activity, in art as in literature. We look upon the literatures of Greece and Rome as a treasure of inestimable value, almost as the foundation of our culture; and we still recommend them as models to all who wish to learn the difficult art of writing and of speaking with precision, elegance, and clearness. And yet how little the ancients wrote and read compared with ourselves! The press did not exist; paper, now the cheapest of materials, was a rare luxury—the papyrus was a most precious Egyptian monopoly. Consequently, the number of persons who could provide themselves with books was very small, and such persons were found only among the _élite_ of culture or of wealth. The only opportunities of reading the people had were afforded by the public notices, and by the laws engraved on bronze or marble tablets. In those times, there was nothing to correspond in any way at all with the newspapers of to-day. In view of the very scanty numbers of the readers of books, those also who wrote them were bound to be few in number; these could not write much. With but very few exceptions, the works bequeathed to us by the ancients are by no means voluminous. Of all the qualities commonly found in Greek and Latin writers, sobriety and conciseness are the most prominent. These virtues were to some extent the product of circumstances. For in times in which paper was so dear, and every copy of a book had to be prepared specially by an amanuensis, conciseness and brevity were the two qualities of importance to insure the wide circulation and preservation of a book.

It was, however, just the circumstance that the ancients wrote so little that enabled them to carry the art of writing to an indescribable pitch of perfection; that enabled them to obtain that clearness, that harmony, that cadence and proportion of phrase, that concentration which has made them the great masters of the literary art for all time. And to-day!—A wolfish, insatiable hunger for printed paper and reading matter is the scourge of our civilisation. Look at the Pantagruelian literary orgies to which Europe and America surrender themselves! Every day brings its daily paper, every week its journals, illustrated or otherwise, every month its reviews and magazines. Then we have the special publications devoted to a particular art, a particular profession, a particular industry, a favourite sport, in number without end. We have, too, the volumes of every kind and quality with which a crowd of publishers congests the book market: novels, poems, books of travel, science, political economy, religion, sport. Who could enumerate all the kinds of books which are published nowadays? Many of these, it is true, do not find readers, but many do; and a certain number, so many readers as to be sold in thousands, in tens of thousands, and to be scattered broadcast all over the world.

But to satisfy a public which is so greedy of reading, an extraordinary number of writers is required at the present day, from the obscure editors of provincial journals to the favoured few who succeed in winning world-fame, and in reaching the position of sovereigns or, if you prefer it, satraps of literature. And all this enormous multitude of writers is compelled to write prolifically and rapidly, because the public wants to read voraciously. It must choose diverse topics, and vary its themes according to the varieties of fashion and events. On the other hand, it is no longer compelled to be concise, both because the public often likes prolixity, which makes reading comfortable and easy, and because, nowadays, printing is so cheap and facile. But the art of writing is being lost through this haste, this instability of public interest, this prolixity. Every tongue is becoming a muddy mixture of words and phrases which have dripped from every point of heaven on to the daily language and literature. Taste is being corrupted, with writers as with readers, deteriorating now into negligence and carelessness, now into affectation and grotesqueness.

* * * * *

Quality and quantity: these are the two principles of the two civilisations, the ancient and the modern. They are two opposite principles, a circumstance which explains why in the last fifty years the gradual triumph of the civilisation of machinery or of industry on a large scale, which aims at multiplying the quantity of riches, has been accompanied by a decline in classical studies. The new generation, even that portion of it that represents the educated classes, has broken away from the study of a world which, though resembling the modern world in so many of its ideas and institutions, differed from the present era in the fundamental conception of life, and professed an entirely different idea of perfection.

However, if the two principles are mutually exclusive, we must ask ourselves, which is true and which false, which is good and which is not. Who is in the right,—we, who wish to fill the world with riches, even at the cost of disfiguring it and making it hideous; or the ancients, who were content to live a life of greater simplicity, of more leisurely and more peaceful activity, but wished to spend it in a persevering effort to materialise their ideals of beauty? In how many of the confused disputes which set the men of our times by the ears is this problem obscurely implied, though the disputants are unaware of it? But the problem is a terrible one, because it involves all the fundamental problems of contemporary life and the very destiny of the gigantic operations to which our own generation, and those which preceded it, have applied themselves with such frenzied activity.

So I will not attempt to solve the formidable problem. Yet may I be permitted to express a thought, simple in itself, but one which presents itself with the smiling countenance of hope. It is, that “opposite” principles do not mean “irreconcilable” principles. Is it not just possible that this craze for work, for riches, and for speed, of which we are victims, may slacken somewhat, and give men time to collect their thoughts, and to piece together again the shattered grandeur of the modern world in the image of a more serene and composed beauty? Are men really doomed to become more insatiable, the richer they become; or will the day arrive when they will think it wiser to employ a larger part of the immense riches they possess, not in producing other riches, but in embellishing the world, seeing that beauty is no less a joy in life than wealth, and that we ourselves, though all athirst for gold, prove that it is so, by searching untiringly in every corner for the few remains of ancient beauty?

I feel that I have not the courage to answer this question with a brutal “No”; and I hope that many others will be of the same opinion. For one cannot help thinking that one of the most marvellous epochs in history would really begin on the day on which Europe and America succeeded in reconciling in a new civilisation the two opposite principles of quantity and quality, and in employing the extraordinary riches at their disposal in adorning and beautifying the world, which their energy and audacity have so immeasurably enlarged in recent centuries.

III

Woman And Home

Some years ago, in the course of the excavations which are being made with such success in Egypt, a papyrus was found which is now known among archæologists by the name of _The Petition of Dionysia_. This papyrus, which belongs to the second century A.D., contains on one side some books of the _Iliad_, on the other a defence presented by a certain Dionysia to an Egyptian court, before which she was defending an action brought against her by her own father affecting her dowry and other questions of interest. To escape paying his daughter and her husband the sums which they demanded, the father had directed the husband to return him his daughter, and had dissolved the marriage. But the daughter, on her side, maintained in her defence that the father had forfeited his right to dissolve her marriage and to separate her from her husband, because her marriage was a “written” marriage—established, that is to say, by an act or document in writing. If it had been an “unwritten” marriage, Dionysia would not have contested her father’s right in that case to dissolve it, for no motive whatever, merely because it so pleased him.

It would be difficult to imagine a document more strange than this, from the point of view of the ideas which prevail at the present day in European and American society. Matrimony is for us an act of so great social importance that the state alone—that is to say, the law, and the law courts—can recognise or dissolve it. To leave the destiny of a family at the mercy of the will of the father of one of the two parties, to recognise as his the right to destroy a family at any moment to suit his individual interest, without being accountable to anyone for so doing, would seem to us a monstrous thing. And yet this monstrous thing seemed to the whole of antiquity, with few restrictions and reservations, legitimate, reasonable, and wise. Differences in the organisation of the family existed in different countries and in different centuries; but they were but superficial, unessential differences. On one point, the whole world agreed: that matrimony should never be considered an act to be left to the will of the contracting parties, but a business transaction which the young people should leave to their fathers to arrange.

Matrimony, as it was in Rome, will serve to give a clear idea of the ancient world’s conception of the family. In Rome, fathers often betrothed their sons when they were still children. They made them marry when they were still quite young, the males before they were twenty, the girls at about sixteen; and they had the right to oblige them at any moment to divorce each other, without being forced to give any reason or explanation. A man might be an exemplary husband, might live with his wife in the most perfect bliss. If the son’s wife, for one reason or another, did not suit the fancy of his father, the son might be obliged any day to put her away. Amongst others to whom this happened was no less a person than Tiberius, at a time when he had already become one of the first figures in the Empire, and had commanded armies in battle. He had married a daughter of Agrippa, and loved her devotedly. The couple were considered in Rome a model of affection and faithfulness. But, at a certain moment, Augustus, who was the adoptive father of Tiberius, judged that for political motives another marriage might have suited Tiberius better; and he, accordingly, obliged Tiberius to divorce her. Tiberius was so much upset, that—as Suetonius tells us—every time he met his first wife in society, he burst into tears—he, who was one of the most formidable generals of his time; so that Augustus had to take measures to prevent their meeting each other. And yet Tiberius had to give way; for his father, in the eyes of the law and in accordance with the ideas current in his time, was absolute arbiter in these matters! Not even a man in the circumstances of Tiberius, who had already been consul, could think of rebelling against the paternal authority.

These few facts suffice to prove how often the ideas which to one epoch and to one civilisation seem the most natural, the most evident, and the most simple, are, on the contrary, complex and difficult ideas, at which mankind has arrived only after a long effort, and weary struggles. Is there anything which seems to us more reasonable than to leave to young people, who wish to found a family, ample liberty of judgment and of choice in the matter of the person with whom they will have to pass their lives? Fathers, it is true, often help their sons by giving advice. They readily place at the disposal of their children their own experience. But it is only in very rare instances that they maintain a struggle _à outrance_, to withhold their children from a marriage on which their hearts are set, or to force on them a repugnant alliance. We consider that the individual’s happiness may depend to some extent on his marriage. It is, therefore, just that everybody should have ample liberty of choice. If the law purported to restore to fathers the right to make or unmake their sons’ marriages, we are convinced that at the present day the vast majority of fathers would refuse to assume such a responsibility, and would consider such a power unjust, excessive, and tyrannical. There is not a father to-day who, however averse he may be to a marriage desired by his son or daughter, does not end by telling him or her, provided a little firmness is shown in resisting his arguments, that after all it is not he, but his son or daughter who has to take the husband or wife in question. Indeed, this inclination to pliability on the part of fathers towards their sons is increasing every day. Every day sees a growing disinclination on the part of fathers to fetter, in a matter of such delicacy and of such importance to the personal happiness of the young, the freedom of the latter’s inclinations, the spontaneous rush of their feelings. Besides, what would be the use of having conquered liberty in so many other spheres, if it were withheld in this which, especially to the young, seems the most important of all: the liberty of yielding to the impulse of that passion which at a certain moment of life is the strongest of all, love?

And yet no idea would have appeared more absurd and scandalous to the men of the ancient world, the contemporaries of Pericles and Cæsar. The difference is so radical and profound that it must arise from important reasons. In fact, whoever compares ancient with modern times easily recognises that the rights of sentiment and the principles of liberty have been able to triumph in modern society only by virtue of a complete transformation in social customs and ordinances, which has stripped the family in our times of much of its social importance. To-day the family is purely and simply a form of social life in common. Man and woman cannot live solitary lives. A powerful instinct impels them towards each other. Even when the instinct is not felt, or is spent, the man needs to live in the company of other human beings, to have round him a circle of persons with whom he may find himself in relations of the closest intimacy. To-day the family performs this profoundly human office—this office and practically no other. Nowadays, man and woman study, work, take part in government, compete for the conquest of wealth and power, and exercise an influence on society—engage in all these activities quite outside the family.

But it was not so in ancient times. The family was then an independent economic organisation, in which the woman had a predominant part. She wove and spun, providing every member of the family with clothes. She made bread, she dried the fruits for the winter, she seized the right moment for laying in the necessary supplies of provisions—a most important task, in times in which commerce was much less developed than it is now. In poor or moderately wealthy families, the women wove and performed similar tasks with their own hands. Rich women learned to do these tasks as children, but later contented themselves with superintending their performance by women slaves or freedwomen. But, especially in the rich families, the woman could contribute a great deal to the prosperity or the ruin of the house, according as she was or was not active in the performance of her work, zealous in her surveillance, energetic and shrewd in giving her orders, moderate in her expenditure. Even to-day the woman can contribute a great deal, in the wealthy classes, to the prosperity of the family. But for this she requires only one negative virtue, for all that this virtue is not too common or easily acquired: to know how to confine her expenses within reasonable limits, and not to be too ready to gratify her whims. In ancient times, on the contrary, if a woman was to be useful to her family she needed as well a positive virtue: to know how to produce much and well. This explains how we come to know that certain emperors’ wives, Livia for instance, directed the weaving operations in their homes personally and with great zeal, and that Augustus was particular not to wear any togas but those woven in his house under the eyes of his wife. The Emperor and his wife by their example meant to recall to all the Roman women the duty of attending with zeal and alacrity to their domestic duties.

The ancient family, especially among the upper classes, was also a school. The ancient world had few institutions of public education; and private instruction did not reach a high level of development, except in the closing years of the Empire. Though Rome was the greatest military power in the world, the family took the place of military schools, which were then non-existent. The officers, who all belonged to the nobility, were prepared in the family. The father was the first military instructor of his sons, and on him fell the duty of making good soldiers of them. This, indeed, was one of the reasons why the aristocracy became indispensable to the Roman Empire; because it alone could prepare the officers and generals in the family.

In short, the ancient family was a sort of political society. Its members were bound to support and help each other in difficult and dangerous contingencies, to a much greater extent than they are nowadays. In political struggles, for instance, they were all of one colour. It was the most difficult and unheard of thing, if indeed not impossible, for a son or a son-in-law to attach himself to a different political party from that of his father or his father-in-law. If a member of the family was implicated in a lawsuit, or financially embarrassed, the family was bound to help him much more energetically, and at much greater risk, than in our day. We see this phenomenon most clearly in Roman history. After the aristocracy split into two opposing parties,—the conservative and the popular, to borrow modern expressions,—a man’s position in one or the other party was determined, almost always, by his birth. He belonged to one party or the other, according as his own family belonged to one or the other. Take Cæsar, for example. Why was Cæsar always a member of the democratic party, and bound to follow its vicissitudes, to the extent of becoming its leader and occasioning a civil war, overturning the ancient government, and establishing a dictatorship which, reviving as it did the saddest memories of Sulla’s reaction, could not fail to be odious to the majority, and which was the cause of Cæsar’s death? It was not the result of any special inclination or ambition of his own. Several times he tried to cross over to the other party, which had much more power and authority; or at any rate, to reach an understanding with it. But his effort was of no avail. He was the nephew of Marius, the most celebrated among the leaders of the popular party, and the one whom the other party most detested. The first impulse towards the whole of the great dictator’s extraordinary career was given by this relationship; he had in the end to bring about a second revolution, because his uncle had already caused one.

It is easy then to understand for what reason, in times in which the family performed so many social offices and was the pivot of so many interests, marriage was not considered as an act to be left to the full discretion of the young and to their love, and why the fathers were conceded the right to decide for themselves in such matters. A marriage involved grave political, economic, and moral responsibilities for the members of both clans. Therefore the young people were required to sacrifice to the common interests of their clan some part of their personal inclinations. In compensation, they had the advantage, in case of danger and of need, of being able to count on the family much more than they can nowadays; the family arrogated to itself, it is true, certain rights in connection with their choice, but in return did not abandon them to their fate in the hour of need.

* * * * *

In short, the ancient marriage, organised though it was on lines which appear to us tyrannical, presented certain advantages which, if considered carefully, will be seen to compensate, at least in part, for the restricted liberty of choice. In the great transformation of civilisation of which the modern marriage is the product, men have, it is true, gained, on the one hand, greater liberty, but have lost, on the other, certain advantages which, in the ancient world, were guaranteed to them by the closer and more vigorous solidarity of the family. Women, on the contrary, have gained much more in the passage from the ancient to the modern world, because in exchange for what they have gained, they have lost practically nothing. The organisation of the modern family is distinguished from that of the ancient especially by the much greater concessions it makes to the woman. Feminists complain loudly of the present condition of woman. It is certain, however, at least to anyone with any knowledge of the history of the past, that at no epoch have women been so little oppressed by men and at no epoch have they enjoyed so many advantages as at present.

In fact, if in the ancient marriage so little liberty of choice was reserved to the man, it is easy to understand that not a ghost of it was conceded to the woman. The man had in addition one advantage. Constrained to submit to the will of the father as long as the latter was alive, he became, when the father died, absolute master of his wife, because he could then repudiate her and marry another, how and when he chose. The almost unfettered liberty of divorce, without any motive, or for the most futile motives, might well be some compensation to the man for the subjection in which the father, while alive, kept him. For the woman, there was no compensation at all. As long as her father lived, she had to obey the man to whom her father gave her. When the father was no more, she still remained in the power of her husband, who could not only repudiate her without any motive, but even marry her to another. In the history of Rome, especially, the men used and abused this privilege in a way, which to us seems sometimes ridiculous, sometimes revolting, and always extravagant. Especially in the last century of the republic, when the struggles between the parties became intense, the most eminent statesmen adopted the habit of consolidating their alliances with marriages. Therefore, we see every political vicissitude of importance shrouded in a curious web of divorces and marriages. Now one great man hands his wife over to another, now he marries the other’s daughter, now gives him his sister to wife. The poor women wander from one house to the other, change husbands from one year to another, with the same facility with which, nowadays, a traveller changes his inn. For all these marriages lasted only as long as the political combination on account of which they were entered into. When the combination was dissolved, divorce broke up all or most of these families, and the husbands set themselves to contract new marriages. It was so easy for the husband to get a divorce. He needed only to write his wife a letter announcing his intention!

Life, then, was bound to be not over-agreeable in Cæsar’s time for an affectionate, delicate, virtuous woman who desired the quiet joys of family life. When we contemplate from afar the historical grandeur and the glory of ancient Rome, we ought not to forget the multitude of hapless women which Rome was forced to sacrifice—a precious holocaust indeed—to her fortune and power. How many women’s broken hearts, how many women’s shattered lives went to make up the foundations of Roman grandeur! Nevertheless, even the greatest evils are never without some small admixture of good; and that sorrowful plight of woman in ancient times, especially of the Roman woman, was offset by one advantage of which liberty has robbed the woman of to-day. That is, that in ancient times, a woman, whether fair or plain, clever or foolish, attractive or insipid, was certain to be married, and that too while she was still young. The husband could not choose her; but she was sure of finding him, and that without undue delay.

In fact, nowhere in the ancient world do we find any striking traces of a feminine celibacy like that which existed later under the influence of Christianity in the convents, or like that which is to-day again coming into prominence for social and economic reasons, without any religious impress or need of monastic vows, especially in the great industrial countries. It seems that women of the upper and middle classes, if they were not positively deformed and physically unsuited for matrimony, all married. Furthermore, inasmuch as marriages, especially among the upper classes, were arranged from political and social motives, no account was taken of the beauty of the bride, but of her social position, her family, and so on. Historians always tell us how many wives the numerous prominent figures in Roman history married, and to what families they belonged. But it is rare for them to tell us whether they were beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, pleasing or unpleasing; these details seemed to them of but trifling importance. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Livia, the last wife of Augustus. All the writers vie in celebrating her rare beauty (to which the statues also bear witness), her wisdom, intelligence, and virtue. But Livia seems really to have been a miracle; for it is a fact that, having married Augustus in her earliest youth, she succeeded in living with him all her life.

Fifteen or sixteen years was considered the suitable age for a bride. Sometimes girls were married when they were barely fourteen, while nowadays it is rare for a girl to marry before she is twenty, and the majority marry between the ages of twenty and thirty. Furthermore, in many states of the ancient world the legal age for matrimony, both for the woman and the man, was much lower than it is to-day in European and American legal codes. This is not surprising. In all times and in all places in which matrimony is considered not as a personal matter of sentiment, but as a social act which must be regulated and directed by the parents, the object is to marry off the young people as quickly as possible. Often they are actually betrothed when they are still children, and share each other’s games of running and jumping. This was a fairly common practice in ancient Rome amongst the nobility, as it is a thriving custom in the China of to-day. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason for this procedure, which, considered by itself, seems to us extravagant and senseless. Love in all times and in all places is a most intractable passion. It is, therefore, more easy in such matters, for the elders to impose their wills and cold-blooded arrangements, on girls of fourteen or fifteen and boys of seventeen or eighteen, than on women or men of twenty-five. Naturally such precocious marriages, contracted between young people who had not yet had a taste of the world, were not free from dangers and serious inconveniences. But these dangers and inconveniences appeared to contemporary eyes less great than those which would have arisen, if the young had been left to follow the dictates of their own feelings.

In conclusion, another advantage which the ancient marriage, with all its many hardships and its want of sympathy, assured to the woman was what one might call the legal protection of virtue. Nowhere was this protection greater and stronger than in ancient Rome. In Rome, the legitimacy of a marriage did not depend, as it does now in Europe and America, on the fulfilment of certain formalities before a priest or a magistrate, but on the moral situation of the woman. An _ingenua et honesta_ woman, to use the expression then current, meaning a free-born woman of irreproachable habits, could live with a man only in the capacity of his legitimate wife. No formality in the presence of any magistrate was required. The fact of living with a man and being _ingenua et honesta_ sufficed to assure to a woman and her own children all the rights appertaining to a wife and to legitimate offspring. On the other hand, a woman who had lived a dissolute life, had engaged in certain employments considered, and justly considered, disgraceful for a woman, or who had been convicted of adultery, could never become a legitimate wife or enjoy the privileges and rights of a legitimate wife. There was no ceremony before a priest or magistrate which could make a legitimate wife of her. She was by law a _concubina_, and in that capacity for a long time had no rights. Only in the course of time could she hope to get the rights, much restricted and of little importance as they were, which the law gradually conceded to the _concubina_.

To transport this ancient conception of matrimony into modern society would doubtless not be possible, because it contradicts the great democratic principle of the equality of all before the law, on which our social organisation rests. But considered by itself this ancient conception of matrimony is without a doubt more lofty and more noble, and in particular more favourable to the woman, than the modern one. For it did not reduce the status of legitimate wife to what is practically a formality, but made it the exclusive privilege of the virtuous woman, and therefore assured the virtuous woman of a kind of privileged legal position, protecting her effectively against the intrigues and seductions of the attractive and gay women who, in the modern régime, are usually the more dangerous to the peace and happiness of the virtuous women, the less austere are their habits. In ancient Rome, the law guaranteed the virtuous woman that at least no one of these women should be able to rob her of the post of honour which she occupied in the family.

The comparison of the ancient marriage with the modern marriage once more proves to us, then, how complex are human affairs, and how difficult it is to pass an absolute and definitive judgment upon them. Certainly, at first sight, the condition of the woman in the ancient family seems to us a horrible one, resembling that of a slave. We wonder how nations that had risen to a lofty level of social, intellectual, and moral development could have tolerated it. But when we consider the matter more attentively, we find that even this condition, wretched though it was in certain respects, was not without certain advantages, which may perhaps explain to us why women put up with it for so many centuries. The liberty which the woman of the present day enjoys has countless advantages; but it has made matrimony for her a struggle, in which, if some triumph, others are worsted, and those who triumph are not always the most virtuous and the most wise. Also, in this order of things, liberty is an excellent thing, especially for the fortunate and the brave; but the fortunate and the brave, where marriages and love are concerned, are not always those who possess the qualities which conduce most effectively to the progress of the world and the improvement of the human species. Modern liberty has set a high price on beauty and intelligence in woman, which is all to the good; but it has also made coquetry, frivolity, and vapidity into qualities which are useful for the conquest of man, who is not always a reasonable being and is even less reasonable than usual when he is in love—which is _not_ all to the good. For there is no doubt that between twenty and thirty years of age a man is much more sensitive to the attractions of a frivolous and seductive girl than to those of a serious and sensible woman.

All human things, then, have their advantages and their disadvantages, and that perhaps is why the world never tires of its experiments in diverse directions and on every topic. Absolute perfection is unattainable—a fact which should make us careful not to boast too loudly of the times in which we live, nor to be too ready to disparage what preceding generations have done.

IV

The Lesson Of The Fall Of The Roman Empire

“_L’histoire est un recommencement perpétuel_,” a French writer has said. If the forms in which history manifests itself are infinitely various, the forces which inspire it are always the same, and are everywhere at work, on a large scale or on a small, openly or secretly. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the decadence of the Roman Empire is being repeated in our time in the modern world.

This assertion may seem paradoxical and strange. What! are we moderns on the downward grade? Why, one hears of nothing but progress on every side. Never was there an epoch more proud of its loudly vaunted achievements. The sciences are adding discovery to discovery. The wealth of the world is increasing with giddy rapidity. Comfort and culture are spreading in every class and in every country. One after another, most recondite treasures of the earth are falling into our hands. We are gradually fighting down all the forces of nature which for so long a time kept our ancestors at a distance, impeded them, even threatened them with death, from the law of gravity to the most insidious maladies. Is it permissible to talk of decadence at the very moment when man has made himself lord of the whole earth, and is even learning to fly? History cannot show a richer, wiser, more powerful, more daring epoch than the present one. No wonder that most people would resent the suggestion that we, in the flush of our brilliant successes, are seeing the repetition of that ancient and terrible history of the last centuries of the Roman Empire, which was one of the saddest and deadliest episodes in the world’s history.

And yet that history is repeating itself, to a certain extent at any rate. The showy wealth and the noisy triumphs of modern civilisation veil, but do not hide, this _recommencement de l’histoire_ from him who studies, in a spirit of philosophy, our times and the decadence of the Roman Empire. It is true that there are immense differences between the two civilisations and the two epochs. But notwithstanding these differences, what wonderful resemblances there are! Consider especially that disease which corrupted the trunk of the Roman Empire, and which is beginning slowly, subtly, insidiously to eat the heart out of the modern world.

The disease which killed the Roman Empire was, in fact, excessive urbanisation. Neither the attacks of barbarism from outside, nor those of Christianity from within, would have prevailed against its might and its massive weight, if the strength of the colossus had not been already undermined by this internal cancer. But, slowly and steadily, the disease had spread through the trunk of the Empire, and had attacked its most vital organs one after the other, fostered on its deadly errand by wealth, peace, art, literature, culture, religion, all the blessings which men most long for and most prize.

In order to understand this extraordinary phenomenon of Roman history, we must hark back to the generations that lived quietly and in a relatively happy state in the flowery times of Rome’s real power and greatness. After two centuries of war, at the beginning of the Christian era, peace was finally established in the great Empire which Rome had conquered. In the days of peace, the barbarian West learned from the Romans how to cultivate the earth, to cut the forests, to excavate the minerals, to navigate the rivers, to speak and to write Latin. It became civilised, and bought the manufactures of the ancient industrial cities of the East. Every fresh market of the West, as it was opened up, gave a stimulus to the ancient industries of the East, which found in such market a new clientèle. Contact with the barbarism of the West rapidly gave fresh youth to the old civilisation of the East,—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor,—which had decayed somewhat in the great crisis of the last century of the republic. Everywhere fresh lands were brought under cultivation, methods of agriculture were perfected, minerals were searched for, new industries and new branches of commerce were opened up. Prosperity and luxury preceding in every nation, even the most barbarous, and in every class, even the poorest, which acquired a taste for the luxuries of civilisation.

An epoch of rapid increase of wealth, of lucky enterprises, of frequent, close, and varied commercial and intellectual intercourse between the most distant peoples, began. In every part of the Empire, in Gaul as well as in Asia Minor, in Spain as well as in Africa, these new trades, these new industries and agricultural enterprises gave rise to a prosperous middle class and to provincial aristocracies,—_nouveaux riches_ families,—which gradually came to form the governing class of the Empire, migrated to the cities, strode to enlarge them, to embellish them, and to make them more comfortable, reproducing in every part of the Empire the splendours of the urban civilisation after the Greco-Asiatic model as perfected by the practical Roman spirit of organisation. In every province, the example of the Emperor in Rome found imitators. In the first and second centuries, every rich family spent part of its possessions on the embellishment of the cities, and made provision for the common people of profits, comforts, and pleasures: they built palaces, villas, theatres, temples, baths, and aqueducts. They distributed grain, oil, amusements, and money. They endowed public services and assumed the rôle of pious founders.

The Empire covered itself with cities great and small, rivalling each other in splendour and wealth; and into these cities, at the expense of depopulating the countryside where nobody was willing any longer to live, it attracted the peasantry, the village artisans, and the yeomanry. In these cities, schools were opened in which the youth of the middle class were taught eloquence, literature, and philosophy, and trained for official posts, the number of which increased from generation to generation, and for the liberal professions. Thus, in the second century A.D., the Empire spread, in the sun of the _pax Romana_, which illumined the world, its countless marble-decked cities, as our time spreads, in the sun of modern civilisation, the confused and smoky opulence of its cities, large and moderate-sized, crowded, disordered, a blaze of light by night, bristling with chimneys and shrouded in black fog by day. In other words, the most important phenomenon in the whole history of the Roman Empire, during the first two centuries of the Christian era, is, as in the nineteenth century, the rapid growth and enrichment of the cities.

The phenomenon was not then so rapid nor on so large a scale as it is to-day; not a single city in the Empire, not even Rome, ever attained, in my opinion, a population of one million inhabitants. The cities which seemed big in those days would be only of moderate size now. Populations and riches were smaller. But the phenomenon in itself was the same.

From the third century onwards, the excessive urbanisation in the Roman Empire, which had been the cause of the splendour and apparent wealth of the preceding century, began to change into a dissolving force, which drove that brilliant world back into the chaos from which urbanisation had evolved it. Little by little, the expenditure of the urban civilisation, the cities and their increasing luxury, out-distanced the fertility of the countryside, and, from that moment, the latter began to be depopulated and sterilised by the cities. With each succeeding generation, the impulse towards the cities became stronger. The numbers and the requirements of the modern population increased. The State and the wealthy classes were inundated with requests, prayers, and threats, urging them to satisfy these requirements, to adorn and enrich ever more and more the cities, which were the glory and splendour of the Empire.

In order to feed, amuse, and clothe crowded city-populations; to carry through the construction of the magnificent monuments whose ruins we still admire; to provide work for the industries and arts of the cities,—agriculture was, little by little, ground down by ever-increasing burdens. The position of the peasant, in the solitude of the depopulated countryside, became ever more sad and gloomy, just as the cities became fairer, bigger, fuller of amusement and festivals. The impulse towards the cities increased, and one day the Empire awoke to find that its cities were swarming with beggars, idlers, vagabonds, masons, plasterers, sculptors, painters, dancers, actors, singers—in short, the whole tribe of the artisans of pleasure and of luxury. But in the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who had crowded into the cities to work or to idle, there was a dearth of peasants to cultivate the land. Also, with the disappearance of the rural population, the problem of recruiting the army, which drew its soldiers then, as always, from the country, became increasingly serious. While the cities tricked themselves out with magnificent monuments, the Empire was threatened with a dearth of bread and of soldiers.

It must be owned that the Empire struggled against this menace with desperate vigour. It introduced the villeinage of the soil. It tried to bind the peasants to the land. It established heredity of trade or calling. But the effort was fruitless. Aggravated by one of the most tremendous intellectual blunders in the annals of history, the crisis became insoluble. The agriculture of the Empire, and with it the Empire itself, received its death-blow. The East and the West split apart, and, left to itself, the West went to pieces. The greatest of the works of Rome, the Empire founded by her in Europe, including the immense territory bounded by the Rhine and the Danube, lay a vast ruin: a ruin of shattered monuments, of peoples relapsed into barbarism, of perished arts, of forgotten tongues, of laws thrown to the four winds, of roads, villages, cities razed from the face of the earth, swallowed up in the primeval forest which slowly and tenaciously thrust out its tentacles, in that cemetery of a past civilisation, and entwined the giant bones of Rome!

But the reader will say: “But that is not happening, and never will happen, to contemporary civilisation. Even if it cannot be denied that there is a certain analogy between the history of the first two centuries of the Empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops short at this point. The world will never witness another catastrophe like that of the Roman Empire; or at any rate, nobody now alive will witness it.”

I heartily concur in this opinion. Modern civilisation will resist the ills which assail it better than ancient civilisation resisted them. But it will be able to do so because it is stronger, not because it does not contain within itself the germ of the cancer which destroyed the Roman world. Many symptoms prove this. I will dilate upon one of them only, the most serious, the most salient, the most generally recognised and felt, even though few up to the present have seen in it an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical crisis of the fall of the Roman Empire. I refer to the rise in the cost of living.

To-day, Europe and America resound from one end to another with a chorus of complaints from men and women who have to live in the cities. Rent, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes—everything, in short, is rising in price. Even people in the thirties can remember having witnessed times of fable, a kind of mythical golden age, in which things were worth practically nothing compared with their price to-day. Governments are besieged with entreaties, threats, and prayers to provide supplies, but they do not know how to do so. What is the cause, what the remedy, of this strange phenomenon? Some lay the blame on the taxes; some on Protection; some on the merchants and speculators.

And indeed, at first sight, the phenomenon seems inexplicable. At no period of history was there such a determined rush to make money as at the present time. No age had at its disposal so many and such effective means of making it. The men of to-day are obsessed to such an extent by the frenzy for work that they no longer have time to live. Statistics tell us in exact figures the yearly increase in the production of the world. So the earth ought to be wallowing in abundance, an abundance such as the world has never seen heretofore. How comes it, then, that men everywhere complain, and most loudly in the richest countries, of the intolerable dearness of everything? What is the object, what the effect, of the work of the man of to-day, if not abundance but scarcity is the recompense of daily toil?

This scarcity is a graver and more complex phenomenon than those who most complain of it suppose, and is not the fault of government or traders. It is a veritable _recommencement de l’histoire_, and the study of the Roman Empire can be of the greatest service in helping us to understand it. It is the first serious, universally felt symptom of that excessive urbanisation which was the ruin of ancient Rome. This modern society arises from the over-development of the cities, from the too rapid increase in the needs and luxuries of the multitudes who live in the cities. Men and money concentrate in the cities, and swell the urban industries and luxury, public and private, intent on putting into operation all the marvels which the fertile modern genius, inspired by competition in the race for progress, is continually inventing. The countryside, on the other hand, has in the last half-century been left too much to itself, and agriculture has been too much neglected, exactly as began to be the case in the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century of the Christian era. It is easy to guess what must be the natural consequence of this lop-sided arrangement. The cities grow bigger; industries increase in number and in size; the luxury and the needs of the masses, crowded together in the cities, augment. On the other hand, there is no proportionate increase in the productiveness of the land. And so the increase in wealth is accompanied by an increasing scarcity of the fruits of the earth; and the things which serve to clothe and feed us—cotton, linen, hemp, wool, cereals, meat, vegetables—nearly all rise in price much more than do manufactured goods. This explains the scarcity that vexes the cities in proportion to their growth in size.

In no country is this phenomenon more apparent and interesting than in the United States. Which of the nations of the world could more easily revel in the most marvellous abundance of everything which it is possible to conceive? The United States has no lack of territories to cultivate; or of capital, which accumulates every year in immeasurable quantity; or of strong arms, Europe providing her with immigrants in the prime of life; or of the spirit of enterprise and of untiring energy. And yet, in no country of Europe are complaints of the expense of living more generally and loudly raised than in the United States. Why? Because in America the disproportion between the progress of the country and that of the cities, between industrial progress and agricultural progress, is even greater than in Europe, the home of populations which for centuries have been accustomed to a country life. Consequently the scarcity is greater and more vexatious in the United States, because the wealth of that country is greater than that of Europe.

Someone will say: “However that may be, if this scarcity which we are experiencing is the most obvious symptom of the excessive urbanisation from which our civilisation is suffering, the suffering cannot be a very serious matter; it must be far from assuming the grave and dangerous aspect which it bore in the time of the Roman Empire. So in this respect also we can consider ourselves lucky; this excessive urbanisation does not cause us more than a certain material uneasiness, which is felt by the middle and lower classes in the cities. In the Roman Empire, on the other hand, it produced a historical catastrophe.” All that is true, without a doubt, but precisely on this account ought the lesson, with which the history of the fall of the Roman Empire is pregnant, to be read and pondered.

In the Roman Empire, too, for a long time, just as now in Europe and America, this excessive urbanisation only occasioned a by-no-means intolerable material uneasiness to the most numerous and poorest classes of town-dweller. In the first and second centuries,—that is to say, in the two most prosperous and splendid centuries of the Empire,—numerous inscriptions remind us of gifts made by rich citizens or precautions taken by the cities to meet the scarcity of victuals which pressed hard upon the poorer classes. It is scarcely necessary to mention Rome in this connection, so notorious is the fact. From the day when it became the metropolis of a vast Empire, the scarcity of victuals became a permanent feature of the city; and the State had to furnish the city with the famous _frumentationes_, which were, in the last two centuries of the Republic and throughout the Empire, one of Rome’s most serious preoccupations. Mistress of a mighty Empire, Rome was for centuries sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by the people that her sword had conquered; but there was never a day in the year when she was sure of keeping the wolf from the door!

In the Roman Empire also, then, for a long time the excessive urbanisation made itself felt in the shape of a troublesome, but by no means intolerable, rise in the cost of living in the cities. Why did it gradually bring about a terrific social dissolution? Because the Roman Empire, instead of leaving its cities to fight down this evil, tried to abolish it by artificial means; and those artificial means it applied ever more and more extensively, the more serious the evil became. The crisis of the cities of the Empire began in the third century, which saw the depopulation of the countryside, and the diminution of agricultural production, while in the cities, on the other hand, victuals were rising in price, and the number of beggars was increasing in a most alarming way. If the State had allowed this crisis to run its natural course, what would have happened? Of course things would of themselves have regained their equilibrium little by little. Part of the urban proletariat, unable to live in the overcrowded cities, and seeing themselves condemned to a sort of chronic famine and gradual extinction, would have returned to work in the fields. When the drain on the population of the countryside becomes too great, the evil admits of only one remedy: and that is, that life in the cities should be allowed to become unbearable to a certain number of the citizens, so that they may be tempted to exchange it for life and work in the fields.

But the Roman State could not bring itself to let the evil follow its natural course. The large cities, beginning with Rome, had too great influence with the Government; and throughout the Empire the city beautiful and rich had come to represent the model of civilisation. Little by little, the State let itself be persuaded to do for each of its cities what it had done for Rome ever since its earliest conception of a world-policy under the delusion that it could thus stave off the impending crisis. With a view to easing the misery of the urban proletariat, it took public works in hand in every direction, regardless of their utility. It distributed victuals free or at half-price. It multiplied philanthropic institutions and encouraged the wealthy families to imitate and to assist it. But all these schemes cost money, which the State could secure only by increasing the taxes on agriculture, while the wealthy families had to spend in the cities the bulk of the wealth which they derived from their country property. The result was that life was artificially made easier and more comfortable in the cities, and harder and more difficult in the country, whereas the natural trend of circumstances would have produced the opposite effect. The evil, treated in so ridiculous a way, became worse. The exodus of the peasants into the cities increased, and brought a corresponding increase in the demands on the public purse for the amelioration of the conditions of city life. The intensification of the evil was met by an increase in the dose of the very remedy which aggravated it—useless expenditure in the cities, ruinous taxes on agriculture. Matters went from worse to worse, until the system reached the limit of its elasticity, and the whole social fabric collapsed in a colossal catastrophe.

This is precisely the mistake which modern civilisation must learn to avoid. The catastrophe of the Roman Empire teaches us moderns one lesson: and that is, that the evil from which the great cities of the civil world are suffering at present is a salutary, health-giving, and beneficent visitation. For it puts a natural brake on the growth of cities and of their luxury, and keeps the population in the fields, where the rise in the price of living brings profit, greater comfort, and improved living in its train. It is, in short, the _vis medicatrix naturæ_, which tends to restore the balance between agriculture and industry, between the city and the country, a balance which the development of modern civilisation has upset. Therefore all the artificial measures which pretend to mitigate this evil, at the very moment when the force of circumstances demands that this development shall stop, must be pernicious. While they tide over a trifling evil of the moment, they lay up for the future troubles and difficulties and dangers of infinitely greater gravity.

Even if modern civilisation adopted in its entirety the policy pursued by the Roman Empire, and tried to eradicate the evil with the same deadly artificial measures which only aggravated it, there would still doubtless be no ground for fearing a catastrophe in the future analogous to that which overwhelmed Greco-Roman civilisation. Modern civilisation is too vast, too powerful, too deep-rooted, to have any fear of a similar fate. But if not destroyed, modern civilisation might be profoundly shaken and weakened in the event of its imitating the policy of Rome and seeking to favour the cities overmuch at the expense of the country;—all the more shaken and weakened, because, dazzled as we all are by the triumphs of the world in which we live, and by the surface marks of its powers and grandeur, it is much more difficult for us than it was for the ancients in a similar case to discern the signs of old age in it, and the cracks which are spreading in the edifice in which we live.

There is a further lesson to be learned by us moderns from the history of the decadence of the Roman Empire: and that is, not to mistake the glamour of the external manifestations of wealth and power for signs of real wealth and power. A civilisation is not always in reality richer and stronger in times when it bears the most visible marks of so being; we are rather apt to find that, when it is most dazzling in outward seeming, its decadence has already begun. We often halt in stupefaction and admiration before the great ruins of ancient Rome, especially those offered by the European provinces of the Empire. We think how great, powerful, and rich must have been the Empire which could rear monuments so massive that all the centuries have not been able to sweep them entirely from the face of the earth. And yet, if we are to look at these relics in their right light, we must remember that practically all the great Roman monuments whose remains survive to our day on a large scale, belong to the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the Christian era—to the centuries of decadence and dissolution. As the Empire weakens and ages, its monuments become more and more elaborate and colossal. A fairly safe rule for guessing the century to which Roman monuments belong is to assume that the more imposing the ruins, the later is the epoch to which they should be attributed.

For Rome herself, the time of the greatest expansion, splendour, and population was the middle of the fourth century—that is to say, when her decadence was already far advanced. Not till then did Rome become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration of the whole world. How much smaller, on the other hand, how much more simple and modest was she in the first century, a time when the Empire really was at its most flourishing epoch, with its frontiers safe, its population on the up-grade, its cities developing themselves by a process of growth which was still a perfectly natural one, agriculture, trade, and industries in a sound condition, and the State well organised and strong.

Nor is this a historical paradox. It is only what always happens to a greater or less extent. In families as in nations and civilisations, ostentation, display, the doing on a grand scale everything, even what might be done on a small scale without detriment, or even advantageously, are a sign of decadence rather than of progress. The passion for the colossal and the enormous is not a healthy passion, nor does it flourish in epochs of strength and sound moral and social equilibrium; it is a passion which thrives in epochs of decadence, epochs convulsed by a deep-seated disproportion between desires and reality, a thirst for excitements and violent sensations, lavish in the expenditure of labour and of wealth to procure a fallacious illusion of grandeur and power, spurred on by a spirit of rivalry and of competition which easily degenerates into false pride.

Not the least of the causes contributing to the maintenance and increase in the ancient cities of that sumptuousness of festivals, ceremonies, and monuments which gradually ruined the Roman Empire was the rivalry between the big, the medium-sized, and the small cities of the Empire, between provinces and districts, between classes, families, professions, sects, and religions. When a city built a theatre, or baths, or a basilica, at once her sister-cities wanted one too, as big or bigger. If a rich family built or endowed a temple or baths, the other families wished to do the same or more. There was a continual competition between the religions to have the finest temple or the most sumptuous ceremonial. That explains why a little city like Verona, for instance, has an enormous amphitheatre, in which the whole population of the city could be accommodated several times over. That explains why the provinces, the cities and private individuals, in this competition of display and magnificence, all showered enormous wealth on that display, wealth which would have been better spent in defending the Empire or in preserving its economic resources. Many of those remains which evoke our admiration to-day meant, in the days when they reared their proud bulk to the sky, the ruin of the Empire!

And now let us search our own consciences. Can we honestly declare that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display, this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. Whoever casts his eyes around him, in America as well as in Europe, sees this impression gaining ground on all sides and acquiring force. It fouls the stream of politics, religion, literature, philosophy and art. It corrupts or transforms the spirit of the upper as well as of the lower classes. Not only that, but there is a prevailing tendency to consider this impression a sign of force, a proof of greatness and of progress. The history of Rome admonishes us, then, to distrust this illusion, and to sound the spirit of our civilisation to its deepest depths—that spirit which to us seems a limpid mirror of perfection, while it is really very much the opposite. If, after twenty centuries of work and study, we find ourselves, fortunate heirs of an ancient civilisation, in a position to live more safely and more comfortably than did our ancestors on this little globe, we are not, therefore, justified in altering the moral values and virtues to suit our pleasures. The vices, the faults, the depraved inclinations of twenty centuries ago remain the same to-day and modern civilisation would be guilty of the gravest of errors if, deaf to the great lesson preached by the ruins of Rome, she boasted of those very defects which destroyed in the ancient world one of the greatest works of human brain and energy that history has to offer.

V

Ups And Downs

We are always talking about progress. But does “progress” mean only the multiplication of wealth and of the power and speed of machines, in other words, of our mastery over nature? This would be a rash assertion. “Progress” implies further improvement of, and increase in, the virtues, and the diminution of the vices inherent in human nature. Now, can anyone who knows the history of ancient civilisation, the life, the customs, the ideas, and the moral outlook of the Greeks and Romans, say that we have become better than they? And if he can say so, how much better have we become? Have we become better in every department of life, or are there some things in which we show a falling-off?

There can be no doubt that we are braver than the ancients. Our control of fire has obliged us to be continually making calls upon our bravery. The formidable machines which we set in motion; the explosives which we use so largely; the murderous forces of nature, like electricity, which we have brought into subservience; the thousand dangerous exploits on the sea, in the bowels of the earth, and in the giddy heights of the air in which thousands, nay millions, of engineers and workmen daily risk their lives, have steeled our temperaments to quell that blind and instinctive fear which lies deep down in human nature.

War is the supreme test of this increased courage. War has become rarer, it is true, than it was in the ancient world; but how much more terrible and awe-inspiring has it become, both by land and by sea, since fire replaced steel as the principal weapon! The only forms of fire known to the ancients as useful in war were boiling oil, which was often used in sieges, and the so-called Greek fire, which was employed in naval battles—a mysterious compound, into which one suspects, petroleum entered, for it was much used by the nations and cities of the Black Sea. But both of these were but children’s toys compared with the guns, shrapnel, and torpedoes of modern warfare. We are justified, therefore, in asserting that the men who took part in the battles of Marathon, Cannæ, and Zama did not need to have hearts so stout or courage so intrepid as the men who faced each other in the great battles of the Napoleonic era, in the American Civil War, in the battles between the Russians and Japanese, or in the recent Balkan War.

But if we are more courageous, we are at the same time less cruel, a fact which throws our superior courage into greater relief. One of the characteristic differences between contemporary civilisation and those which preceded it, up to the French Revolution, is the total suppression of the bloody spectacles which, under so many aspects and forms, were one of the most sinister delights of our ancestors. We find the greatest difficulty in understanding how so highly civilised a people as the Romans, with so many thoughts and feelings in common with ourselves, could have been roused to such a pitch of intoxication by the games of gladiators and the baiting of wild beasts. And yet the popular passion for these bloody games was such that even the emperors, in whom they inspired feelings of horror and repulsion, like Augustus, were compelled to attend the gory spectacles, so as not to appear, by their absence, to rebuke those who supported them and to run counter to the absorbing passion of the masses for them.

On the other hand, if an ancient Roman came back to the world, and saw an American stadium packed with people from top to bottom, he would be not a little puzzled to explain what could have induced so many thousands of persons to have flocked together from afar merely to watch a football match,—to collect in such crowds, endure such a long journey, and such discomfort, just to get a distant view of some youths kicking their legs in the air! It would seem to them a truly insipid and tiresome spectacle. Their tastes ran to a gory struggle, reminiscent of war, to fights between men and animals, blood in bucketfuls.

Christianity initiated that education of men’s feelings which has made us gradually turn away our eyes in horror from these atrocious diversions. But how slow and difficult this education has been! It can safely be said not to have reached its climax until after the Revolution. Only the nineteenth century, intent on mitigating and humanising the penal law in every direction, has finally succeeded in abolishing the last of these cruel spectacles, capital punishment. Right up to the end of the eighteenth century, condemned prisoners were executed throughout Europe with much pomp and in the full light of day, in the central squares of the cities, at times and places at which everybody could attend, as if at a public festival. Indeed, executions were invariably attended by an immense public, attracted by cruel curiosity to see a man going to his death. By diminishing the number of death sentences, and by executing culprits in prison yards in the presence of a handful of witnesses, or, as is still done in France, in public, but at dawn, with the public kept at as great a distance as possible, the nineteenth century has put the crown on one of the most far-reaching and wonderful moral transformations of the human mind, a transformation which owes its birth to the words of Christ uttered twenty centuries ago, and has given modern civilisation one notable reason for boasting itself superior to the ancient.

But if we are more courageous and more humane, we are, on the other hand, in no way more sober or more temperate. As far as these virtues are concerned, the ancient world cuts a much better figure in history than does the modern. We have deteriorated. The modern world eats and drinks to excess. It indulges to excess in alcoholic drinks and stimulants. The only intoxicating drinks known to the ancients were wine and beer, and wine they always drank mixed with water. They did not know alcohol, nor consequently, liqueurs, now so numerous and so highly appreciated; they did not know tea, coffee, or tobacco. We can assert positively that drunkenness was the rarest of vices in the ancient world, while frugality was the commonest of virtues. We need not take too seriously those orgies of the wealthy to which ancient writers—especially Latin writers—so often allude, or the banquets at which dishes of parrots’ tongues were served, or pearls dissolved in vinegar were drunk. These stories bear a strong family likeness to the legends current in Europe about “the corrupt state of American society,” and are due to the same tendency. They are the exaggerated and violent reaction of an ancient puritanism against the natural advances of luxury and against that kind of moral slackening which always accompanies the increase of wealth. Just as the dispassionate and unprejudiced European, when he examines at close-quarters the so-called “corrupt state of American society,” readily recognises that the high-sounding expression only indicates certain defects and weaknesses which certainly are reprehensible, but which are common to the whole of modern civilisation and not peculiar to America, so the famous Roman orgies and the banquets, which have made so much stir, would seem to us, if a miracle allowed us to attend them, very modest and unassuming affairs compared to our ostentatious displays.

As far, then, as sobriety and temperance are concerned, we cannot confront our ancestors with too haughty a mien. And what shall we say about the purity of our customs? That is a much more difficult problem, perhaps an absolutely insoluble one. At least I, for my part, do not feel myself competent to solve it. To judge from Greco-Latin literature and art, one would say that in the ancient world, with the exception of a few countries and certain epochs, such as the centuries during which Rome was controlled by a puritan aristocracy, the customs of both men and women were very free and easy. But literature and art often afford untrustworthy evidence on which to base a judgment as to the customs of an epoch. For vice, wrong, and crime, though they may shock the moral sense, are more interesting subjects for art than are virtue and honesty. In short, literature and art always seek to describe what is rare, exceptional, and dramatic. Therefore, if we wish to judge the moral state of an epoch from its literature and art, we must know how far and in what degree the faults and vices described or chosen for artistic representation are common, what is the rule, and how many are the exceptions. And how are we to find this out? We shall have to know the moral state of the epoch, and literature will not help us to this knowledge.

Anybody who judged Paris from the novels or dramas which deal with Parisian life would be forced to conclude that the French metropolis spends the whole of its time in amorous adventures. But anyone who _knows_ Paris is aware, what is after all an _a priori_ supposition, that love occupies in its life a very much less prominent place than in its literature; and that the writers of dramas and novels go to love for their subject by preference, because love admits of more attractive treatment than do struggles for money or the rivalries of political ambitions and the crosses of the intellectual life. For the rest, when we wish to judge the customs of an epoch or of a people, we must not forget that it is not always the epochs or the nations which lament most loudly the depravity of customs that are the most corrupt. Far from it! Often the epochs which bewail their own vices most bitterly are those in which the moral conscience is still lively and robust and, therefore, protests against the evil. The epochs which are dumb, and seem most virtuous, have often reached such a pitch of depravity, that they have become indifferent to the evil.

A striking instance of this curious phenomenon is to be found in the history of Rome. Horrible stories are told of the first period of the Empire,—extending from Augustus to Nero,—during which the family of the Julio-Claudii were at the helm of the State. History and literature are full of scandals, and of laments over the depravity of the times. In the second period, on the other hand,—that of the Flavii and Antonines,—the scandals and protests cease. The depravity of the preceding century seems suddenly to have mysteriously disappeared. The Roman world has, by a kind of miraculous conversion, in a few years turned virtuous. In fact, not a few historians have thought that this miracle did come about, and have credited it to the virtuous emperors of the second century. After so many bad emperors, Rome at last got some good ones; and the trick was done! But anybody who studies the facts with a little patience will have no hesitation in concluding that the times of the Antonines were at least as corrupt as those of the Julio-Claudii; but that, while in the first century of the Christian era the ancient Puritan spirit of Rome was still alive and vigorous, and therefore protested against the deterioration of customs with such energy that its protests have reached even to our ears, in the epoch of the Antonines, on the other hand, this spirit was spent. Consequently, everybody resigned himself to the evil, either despairing of being able to cure it, or not giving it a thought. And so, of the two epochs, that which was painted in the blacker colours was, perhaps, really the better.

It is impossible, then, to decide whether our customs are better or worse than those of the ancients. It is certain, on the other hand, that we are much more human than they. For with us, a sentiment, which with the ancients was very weak, if not non-existent, is lively and profound, the sentiment of the moral equality of every individual. The ancients simply refused to recognise in the slave and in the free man, in the nobleman and in the plebeian, in the citizen and in the foreigner, human creatures made of the same clay and animated by the same spirit, whom the mysterious accidents of fortune had placed in different situations, and all of whom had certain sacred and inviolable rights in the supreme domain of justice. A few philosophers dared just to hint at such doctrines, but without laying too much stress upon them. And theirs were voices crying in the wilderness. The free man, the patrician, and the citizen felt themselves creatures of another species and of a higher nature than slaves, plebeians, and foreigners, towards whom the former group might have capricious bursts of benevolence, but to whom they never regarded themselves as bound by any obligation. Hence came that asperity which appears in all the social relations of ancient peoples,—in their laws, their customs, their wars, their political quarrels,—and which often seems to us in so striking a contrast with the lofty and noble culture which adorned the ancient states.

Augustus, for instance, was a grave, well-balanced, and prudent man, who avoided all extremes. Yet the ancient writers tell us to his credit that he had amongst his numerous freedmen several men of the loftiest intellect, of wide knowledge, and of transparent honesty, who had rendered him great services; but that, though he held them in great honour, he never invited any of them to his table. Such an act of familiarity between freedmen and patricians would have seemed to the ancients derogatory, and so they praised Augustus for having avoided it. To us, on the other hand, this attitude of reserve on the part of the great Emperor seems strange and incomprehensible, as it would seem on the part of a great and wealthy manufacturer who was ashamed to dine with the h