Chapter III: Part II: Ancient History and the Modern World (2)

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.

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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.

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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.