Chapter II: Part II: Ancient History and the Modern World (1)

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.

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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.