members were bound to support and help each other in difficult and
dangerous contingencies, to a much greater extent than they are
nowadays. In political struggles, for instance, they were all of one
colour. It was the most difficult and unheard of thing, if indeed not
impossible, for a son or a son-in-law to attach himself to a different
political party from that of his father or his father-in-law. If a
member of the family was implicated in a lawsuit, or financially
embarrassed, the family was bound to help him much more energetically,
and at much greater risk, than in our day. We see this phenomenon
most clearly in Roman history. After the aristocracy split into two
opposing parties,—the conservative and the popular, to borrow modern
expressions,—a man’s position in one or the other party was determined,
almost always, by his birth. He belonged to one party or the other,
according as his own family belonged to one or the other. Take Cæsar,
for example. Why was Cæsar always a member of the democratic party,
and bound to follow its vicissitudes, to the extent of becoming its
leader and occasioning a civil war, overturning the ancient government,
and establishing a dictatorship which, reviving as it did the saddest
memories of Sulla’s reaction, could not fail to be odious to the
majority, and which was the cause of Cæsar’s death? It was not the
result of any special inclination or ambition of his own. Several times
he tried to cross over to the other party, which had much more power
and authority; or at any rate, to reach an understanding with it. But
his effort was of no avail. He was the nephew of Marius, the most
celebrated among the leaders of the popular party, and the one whom the
other party most detested. The first impulse towards the whole of the
great dictator’s extraordinary career was given by this relationship;
he had in the end to bring about a second revolution, because his uncle
had already caused one.
It is easy then to understand for what reason, in times in which the
family performed so many social offices and was the pivot of so many
interests, marriage was not considered as an act to be left to the full
discretion of the young and to their love, and why the fathers were
conceded the right to decide for themselves in such matters. A marriage
involved grave political, economic, and moral responsibilities for
the members of both clans. Therefore the young people were required
to sacrifice to the common interests of their clan some part of their
personal inclinations. In compensation, they had the advantage, in case
of danger and of need, of being able to count on the family much more
than they can nowadays; the family arrogated to itself, it is true,
certain rights in connection with their choice, but in return did not
abandon them to their fate in the hour of need.
* * * * *
In short, the ancient marriage, organised though it was on lines
which appear to us tyrannical, presented certain advantages which, if
considered carefully, will be seen to compensate, at least in part,
for the restricted liberty of choice. In the great transformation of
civilisation of which the modern marriage is the product, men have,
it is true, gained, on the one hand, greater liberty, but have lost,
on the other, certain advantages which, in the ancient world, were
guaranteed to them by the closer and more vigorous solidarity of the
family. Women, on the contrary, have gained much more in the passage
from the ancient to the modern world, because in exchange for what they
have gained, they have lost practically nothing. The organisation of
the modern family is distinguished from that of the ancient especially
by the much greater concessions it makes to the woman. Feminists
complain loudly of the present condition of woman. It is certain,
however, at least to anyone with any knowledge of the history of the
past, that at no epoch have women been so little oppressed by men and
at no epoch have they enjoyed so many advantages as at present.
In fact, if in the ancient marriage so little liberty of choice was
reserved to the man, it is easy to understand that not a ghost of it
was conceded to the woman. The man had in addition one advantage.
Constrained to submit to the will of the father as long as the latter
was alive, he became, when the father died, absolute master of his
wife, because he could then repudiate her and marry another, how and
when he chose. The almost unfettered liberty of divorce, without any
motive, or for the most futile motives, might well be some compensation
to the man for the subjection in which the father, while alive, kept
him. For the woman, there was no compensation at all. As long as her
father lived, she had to obey the man to whom her father gave her. When
the father was no more, she still remained in the power of her husband,
who could not only repudiate her without any motive, but even marry
her to another. In the history of Rome, especially, the men used and
abused this privilege in a way, which to us seems sometimes ridiculous,
sometimes revolting, and always extravagant. Especially in the last
century of the republic, when the struggles between the parties became
intense, the most eminent statesmen adopted the habit of consolidating
their alliances with marriages. Therefore, we see every political
vicissitude of importance shrouded in a curious web of divorces and
marriages. Now one great man hands his wife over to another, now he
marries the other’s daughter, now gives him his sister to wife. The
poor women wander from one house to the other, change husbands from
one year to another, with the same facility with which, nowadays, a
traveller changes his inn. For all these marriages lasted only as long
as the political combination on account of which they were entered
into. When the combination was dissolved, divorce broke up all or most
of these families, and the husbands set themselves to contract new
marriages. It was so easy for the husband to get a divorce. He needed
only to write his wife a letter announcing his intention!
Life, then, was bound to be not over-agreeable in Cæsar’s time for
an affectionate, delicate, virtuous woman who desired the quiet joys
of family life. When we contemplate from afar the historical grandeur
and the glory of ancient Rome, we ought not to forget the multitude of
hapless women which Rome was forced to sacrifice—a precious holocaust
indeed—to her fortune and power. How many women’s broken hearts, how
many women’s shattered lives went to make up the foundations of Roman
grandeur! Nevertheless, even the greatest evils are never without some
small admixture of good; and that sorrowful plight of woman in ancient
times, especially of the Roman woman, was offset by one advantage of
which liberty has robbed the woman of to-day. That is, that in ancient
times, a woman, whether fair or plain, clever or foolish, attractive or
insipid, was certain to be married, and that too while she was still
young. The husband could not choose her; but she was sure of finding
him, and that without undue delay.
In fact, nowhere in the ancient world do we find any striking traces of
a feminine celibacy like that which existed later under the influence
of Christianity in the convents, or like that which is to-day again
coming into prominence for social and economic reasons, without any
religious impress or need of monastic vows, especially in the great
industrial countries. It seems that women of the upper and middle
classes, if they were not positively deformed and physically unsuited
for matrimony, all married. Furthermore, inasmuch as marriages,
especially among the upper classes, were arranged from political and
social motives, no account was taken of the beauty of the bride, but of
her social position, her family, and so on. Historians always tell us
how many wives the numerous prominent figures in Roman history married,
and to what families they belonged. But it is rare for them to tell us
whether they were beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, pleasing or
unpleasing; these details seemed to them of but trifling importance.
One of the few exceptions to this rule is Livia, the last wife of
Augustus. All the writers vie in celebrating her rare beauty (to which
the statues also bear witness), her wisdom, intelligence, and virtue.
But Livia seems really to have been a miracle; for it is a fact that,
having married Augustus in her earliest youth, she succeeded in living
with him all her life.
Fifteen or sixteen years was considered the suitable age for a bride.
Sometimes girls were married when they were barely fourteen, while
nowadays it is rare for a girl to marry before she is twenty, and the
majority marry between the ages of twenty and thirty. Furthermore, in
many states of the ancient world the legal age for matrimony, both for
the woman and the man, was much lower than it is to-day in European and
American legal codes. This is not surprising. In all times and in all
places in which matrimony is considered not as a personal matter of
sentiment, but as a social act which must be regulated and directed by
the parents, the object is to marry off the young people as quickly
as possible. Often they are actually betrothed when they are still
children, and share each other’s games of running and jumping. This
was a fairly common practice in ancient Rome amongst the nobility, as
it is a thriving custom in the China of to-day. Nor is it difficult to
understand the reason for this procedure, which, considered by itself,
seems to us extravagant and senseless. Love in all times and in all
places is a most intractable passion. It is, therefore, more easy in
such matters, for the elders to impose their wills and cold-blooded
arrangements, on girls of fourteen or fifteen and boys of seventeen
or eighteen, than on women or men of twenty-five. Naturally such
precocious marriages, contracted between young people who had not
yet had a taste of the world, were not free from dangers and serious
inconveniences. But these dangers and inconveniences appeared to
contemporary eyes less great than those which would have arisen, if the
young had been left to follow the dictates of their own feelings.
In conclusion, another advantage which the ancient marriage, with all
its many hardships and its want of sympathy, assured to the woman was
what one might call the legal protection of virtue. Nowhere was this
protection greater and stronger than in ancient Rome. In Rome, the
legitimacy of a marriage did not depend, as it does now in Europe and
America, on the fulfilment of certain formalities before a priest or
a magistrate, but on the moral situation of the woman. An _ingenua
et honesta_ woman, to use the expression then current, meaning a
free-born woman of irreproachable habits, could live with a man only in
the capacity of his legitimate wife. No formality in the presence of
any magistrate was required. The fact of living with a man and being
_ingenua et honesta_ sufficed to assure to a woman and her own children
all the rights appertaining to a wife and to legitimate offspring. On
the other hand, a woman who had lived a dissolute life, had engaged
in certain employments considered, and justly considered, disgraceful
for a woman, or who had been convicted of adultery, could never become
a legitimate wife or enjoy the privileges and rights of a legitimate
wife. There was no ceremony before a priest or magistrate which could
make a legitimate wife of her. She was by law a _concubina_, and in
that capacity for a long time had no rights. Only in the course of
time could she hope to get the rights, much restricted and of little
importance as they were, which the law gradually conceded to the
_concubina_.
To transport this ancient conception of matrimony into modern society
would doubtless not be possible, because it contradicts the great
democratic principle of the equality of all before the law, on which
our social organisation rests. But considered by itself this ancient
conception of matrimony is without a doubt more lofty and more noble,
and in particular more favourable to the woman, than the modern
one. For it did not reduce the status of legitimate wife to what is
practically a formality, but made it the exclusive privilege of the
virtuous woman, and therefore assured the virtuous woman of a kind
of privileged legal position, protecting her effectively against the
intrigues and seductions of the attractive and gay women who, in
the modern régime, are usually the more dangerous to the peace and
happiness of the virtuous women, the less austere are their habits.
In ancient Rome, the law guaranteed the virtuous woman that at least
no one of these women should be able to rob her of the post of honour
which she occupied in the family.
The comparison of the ancient marriage with the modern marriage once
more proves to us, then, how complex are human affairs, and how
difficult it is to pass an absolute and definitive judgment upon
them. Certainly, at first sight, the condition of the woman in the
ancient family seems to us a horrible one, resembling that of a slave.
We wonder how nations that had risen to a lofty level of social,
intellectual, and moral development could have tolerated it. But
when we consider the matter more attentively, we find that even this
condition, wretched though it was in certain respects, was not without
certain advantages, which may perhaps explain to us why women put up
with it for so many centuries. The liberty which the woman of the
present day enjoys has countless advantages; but it has made matrimony
for her a struggle, in which, if some triumph, others are worsted,
and those who triumph are not always the most virtuous and the most
wise. Also, in this order of things, liberty is an excellent thing,
especially for the fortunate and the brave; but the fortunate and the
brave, where marriages and love are concerned, are not always those who
possess the qualities which conduce most effectively to the progress of
the world and the improvement of the human species. Modern liberty has
set a high price on beauty and intelligence in woman, which is all to
the good; but it has also made coquetry, frivolity, and vapidity into
qualities which are useful for the conquest of man, who is not always
a reasonable being and is even less reasonable than usual when he is
in love—which is _not_ all to the good. For there is no doubt that
between twenty and thirty years of age a man is much more sensitive to
the attractions of a frivolous and seductive girl than to those of a
serious and sensible woman.
All human things, then, have their advantages and their disadvantages,
and that perhaps is why the world never tires of its experiments
in diverse directions and on every topic. Absolute perfection is
unattainable—a fact which should make us careful not to boast too
loudly of the times in which we live, nor to be too ready to disparage
what preceding generations have done.
IV
THE LESSON OF THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
“_L’histoire est un recommencement perpétuel_,” a French writer has
said. If the forms in which history manifests itself are infinitely
various, the forces which inspire it are always the same, and are
everywhere at work, on a large scale or on a small, openly or secretly.
It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the decadence of the Roman
Empire is being repeated in our time in the modern world.
This assertion may seem paradoxical and strange. What! are we moderns
on the downward grade? Why, one hears of nothing but progress on
every side. Never was there an epoch more proud of its loudly vaunted
achievements. The sciences are adding discovery to discovery. The
wealth of the world is increasing with giddy rapidity. Comfort and
culture are spreading in every class and in every country. One after
another, most recondite treasures of the earth are falling into our
hands. We are gradually fighting down all the forces of nature which
for so long a time kept our ancestors at a distance, impeded them,
even threatened them with death, from the law of gravity to the most
insidious maladies. Is it permissible to talk of decadence at the very
moment when man has made himself lord of the whole earth, and is even
learning to fly? History cannot show a richer, wiser, more powerful,
more daring epoch than the present one. No wonder that most people
would resent the suggestion that we, in the flush of our brilliant
successes, are seeing the repetition of that ancient and terrible
history of the last centuries of the Roman Empire, which was one of the
saddest and deadliest episodes in the world’s history.
And yet that history is repeating itself, to a certain extent at any
rate. The showy wealth and the noisy triumphs of modern civilisation
veil, but do not hide, this _recommencement de l’histoire_ from him who
studies, in a spirit of philosophy, our times and the decadence of the
Roman Empire. It is true that there are immense differences between
the two civilisations and the two epochs. But notwithstanding these
differences, what wonderful resemblances there are! Consider especially
that disease which corrupted the trunk of the Roman Empire, and which
is beginning slowly, subtly, insidiously to eat the heart out of the
modern world.
The disease which killed the Roman Empire was, in fact, excessive
urbanisation. Neither the attacks of barbarism from outside, nor those
of Christianity from within, would have prevailed against its might
and its massive weight, if the strength of the colossus had not been
already undermined by this internal cancer. But, slowly and steadily,
the disease had spread through the trunk of the Empire, and had
attacked its most vital organs one after the other, fostered on its
deadly errand by wealth, peace, art, literature, culture, religion, all
the blessings which men most long for and most prize.
In order to understand this extraordinary phenomenon of Roman history,
we must hark back to the generations that lived quietly and in a
relatively happy state in the flowery times of Rome’s real power
and greatness. After two centuries of war, at the beginning of the
Christian era, peace was finally established in the great Empire which
Rome had conquered. In the days of peace, the barbarian West learned
from the Romans how to cultivate the earth, to cut the forests, to
excavate the minerals, to navigate the rivers, to speak and to write
Latin. It became civilised, and bought the manufactures of the ancient
industrial cities of the East. Every fresh market of the West, as it
was opened up, gave a stimulus to the ancient industries of the East,
which found in such market a new clientèle. Contact with the barbarism
of the West rapidly gave fresh youth to the old civilisation of the
East,—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor,—which had decayed somewhat in the great
crisis of the last century of the republic. Everywhere fresh lands
were brought under cultivation, methods of agriculture were perfected,
minerals were searched for, new industries and new branches of commerce
were opened up. Prosperity and luxury preceding in every nation, even
the most barbarous, and in every class, even the poorest, which
acquired a taste for the luxuries of civilisation.
An epoch of rapid increase of wealth, of lucky enterprises, of
frequent, close, and varied commercial and intellectual intercourse
between the most distant peoples, began. In every part of the Empire,
in Gaul as well as in Asia Minor, in Spain as well as in Africa, these
new trades, these new industries and agricultural enterprises gave rise
to a prosperous middle class and to provincial aristocracies,—_nouveaux
riches_ families,—which gradually came to form the governing class
of the Empire, migrated to the cities, strode to enlarge them, to
embellish them, and to make them more comfortable, reproducing in every
part of the Empire the splendours of the urban civilisation after the
Greco-Asiatic model as perfected by the practical Roman spirit of
organisation. In every province, the example of the Emperor in Rome
found imitators. In the first and second centuries, every rich family
spent part of its possessions on the embellishment of the cities,
and made provision for the common people of profits, comforts, and
pleasures: they built palaces, villas, theatres, temples, baths, and
aqueducts. They distributed grain, oil, amusements, and money. They
endowed public services and assumed the rôle of pious founders.
The Empire covered itself with cities great and small, rivalling each
other in splendour and wealth; and into these cities, at the expense
of depopulating the countryside where nobody was willing any longer
to live, it attracted the peasantry, the village artisans, and the
yeomanry. In these cities, schools were opened in which the youth of
the middle class were taught eloquence, literature, and philosophy,
and trained for official posts, the number of which increased from
generation to generation, and for the liberal professions. Thus, in the
second century A.D., the Empire spread, in the sun of the _pax Romana_,
which illumined the world, its countless marble-decked cities, as our
time spreads, in the sun of modern civilisation, the confused and smoky
opulence of its cities, large and moderate-sized, crowded, disordered,
a blaze of light by night, bristling with chimneys and shrouded in
black fog by day. In other words, the most important phenomenon in the
whole history of the Roman Empire, during the first two centuries of
the Christian era, is, as in the nineteenth century, the rapid growth
and enrichment of the cities.
The phenomenon was not then so rapid nor on so large a scale as it is
to-day; not a single city in the Empire, not even Rome, ever attained,
in my opinion, a population of one million inhabitants. The cities
which seemed big in those days would be only of moderate size now.
Populations and riches were smaller. But the phenomenon in itself was
the same.
From the third century onwards, the excessive urbanisation in the
Roman Empire, which had been the cause of the splendour and apparent
wealth of the preceding century, began to change into a dissolving
force, which drove that brilliant world back into the chaos from
which urbanisation had evolved it. Little by little, the expenditure
of the urban civilisation, the cities and their increasing luxury,
out-distanced the fertility of the countryside, and, from that moment,
the latter began to be depopulated and sterilised by the cities.
With each succeeding generation, the impulse towards the cities
became stronger. The numbers and the requirements of the modern
population increased. The State and the wealthy classes were inundated
with requests, prayers, and threats, urging them to satisfy these
requirements, to adorn and enrich ever more and more the cities, which
were the glory and splendour of the Empire.
In order to feed, amuse, and clothe crowded city-populations; to
carry through the construction of the magnificent monuments whose
ruins we still admire; to provide work for the industries and arts
of the cities,—agriculture was, little by little, ground down by
ever-increasing burdens. The position of the peasant, in the solitude
of the depopulated countryside, became ever more sad and gloomy, just
as the cities became fairer, bigger, fuller of amusement and festivals.
The impulse towards the cities increased, and one day the Empire awoke
to find that its cities were swarming with beggars, idlers, vagabonds,
masons, plasterers, sculptors, painters, dancers, actors, singers—in
short, the whole tribe of the artisans of pleasure and of luxury.
But in the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who
had crowded into the cities to work or to idle, there was a dearth
of peasants to cultivate the land. Also, with the disappearance of
the rural population, the problem of recruiting the army, which drew
its soldiers then, as always, from the country, became increasingly
serious. While the cities tricked themselves out with magnificent
monuments, the Empire was threatened with a dearth of bread and of
soldiers.
It must be owned that the Empire struggled against this menace with
desperate vigour. It introduced the villeinage of the soil. It tried
to bind the peasants to the land. It established heredity of trade or
calling. But the effort was fruitless. Aggravated by one of the most
tremendous intellectual blunders in the annals of history, the crisis
became insoluble. The agriculture of the Empire, and with it the Empire
itself, received its death-blow. The East and the West split apart,
and, left to itself, the West went to pieces. The greatest of the works
of Rome, the Empire founded by her in Europe, including the immense
territory bounded by the Rhine and the Danube, lay a vast ruin: a ruin
of shattered monuments, of peoples relapsed into barbarism, of perished
arts, of forgotten tongues, of laws thrown to the four winds, of roads,
villages, cities razed from the face of the earth, swallowed up in the
primeval forest which slowly and tenaciously thrust out its tentacles,
in that cemetery of a past civilisation, and entwined the giant bones
of Rome!
But the reader will say: “But that is not happening, and never will
happen, to contemporary civilisation. Even if it cannot be denied
that there is a certain analogy between the history of the first two
centuries of the Empire and that of modern times, the analogy stops
short at this point. The world will never witness another catastrophe
like that of the Roman Empire; or at any rate, nobody now alive will
witness it.”
I heartily concur in this opinion. Modern civilisation will resist the
ills which assail it better than ancient civilisation resisted them.
But it will be able to do so because it is stronger, not because it
does not contain within itself the germ of the cancer which destroyed
the Roman world. Many symptoms prove this. I will dilate upon one of
them only, the most serious, the most salient, the most generally
recognised and felt, even though few up to the present have seen in it
an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical crisis of the fall
of the Roman Empire. I refer to the rise in the cost of living.
To-day, Europe and America resound from one end to another with a
chorus of complaints from men and women who have to live in the cities.
Rent, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes—everything, in
short, is rising in price. Even people in the thirties can remember
having witnessed times of fable, a kind of mythical golden age, in
which things were worth practically nothing compared with their price
to-day. Governments are besieged with entreaties, threats, and prayers
to provide supplies, but they do not know how to do so. What is the
cause, what the remedy, of this strange phenomenon? Some lay the blame
on the taxes; some on Protection; some on the merchants and speculators.
And indeed, at first sight, the phenomenon seems inexplicable. At no
period of history was there such a determined rush to make money as at
the present time. No age had at its disposal so many and such effective
means of making it. The men of to-day are obsessed to such an extent by
the frenzy for work that they no longer have time to live. Statistics
tell us in exact figures the yearly increase in the production of the
world. So the earth ought to be wallowing in abundance, an abundance
such as the world has never seen heretofore. How comes it, then, that
men everywhere complain, and most loudly in the richest countries, of
the intolerable dearness of everything? What is the object, what the
effect, of the work of the man of to-day, if not abundance but scarcity
is the recompense of daily toil?
This scarcity is a graver and more complex phenomenon than those who
most complain of it suppose, and is not the fault of government or
traders. It is a veritable _recommencement de l’histoire_, and the
study of the Roman Empire can be of the greatest service in helping
us to understand it. It is the first serious, universally felt
symptom of that excessive urbanisation which was the ruin of ancient
Rome. This modern society arises from the over-development of the
cities, from the too rapid increase in the needs and luxuries of the
multitudes who live in the cities. Men and money concentrate in the
cities, and swell the urban industries and luxury, public and private,
intent on putting into operation all the marvels which the fertile
modern genius, inspired by competition in the race for progress, is
continually inventing. The countryside, on the other hand, has in the
last half-century been left too much to itself, and agriculture has
been too much neglected, exactly as began to be the case in the Roman
Empire at the beginning of the second century of the Christian era. It
is easy to guess what must be the natural consequence of this lop-sided
arrangement. The cities grow bigger; industries increase in number
and in size; the luxury and the needs of the masses, crowded together
in the cities, augment. On the other hand, there is no proportionate
increase in the productiveness of the land. And so the increase in
wealth is accompanied by an increasing scarcity of the fruits of the
earth; and the things which serve to clothe and feed us—cotton, linen,
hemp, wool, cereals, meat, vegetables—nearly all rise in price much
more than do manufactured goods. This explains the scarcity that vexes
the cities in proportion to their growth in size.
In no country is this phenomenon more apparent and interesting than
in the United States. Which of the nations of the world could more
easily revel in the most marvellous abundance of everything which it is
possible to conceive? The United States has no lack of territories to
cultivate; or of capital, which accumulates every year in immeasurable
quantity; or of strong arms, Europe providing her with immigrants in
the prime of life; or of the spirit of enterprise and of untiring
energy. And yet, in no country of Europe are complaints of the expense
of living more generally and loudly raised than in the United States.
Why? Because in America the disproportion between the progress of
the country and that of the cities, between industrial progress and
agricultural progress, is even greater than in Europe, the home of
populations which for centuries have been accustomed to a country life.
Consequently the scarcity is greater and more vexatious in the United
States, because the wealth of that country is greater than that of
Europe.
Someone will say: “However that may be, if this scarcity which we are
experiencing is the most obvious symptom of the excessive urbanisation
from which our civilisation is suffering, the suffering cannot be
a very serious matter; it must be far from assuming the grave and
dangerous aspect which it bore in the time of the Roman Empire. So
in this respect also we can consider ourselves lucky; this excessive
urbanisation does not cause us more than a certain material uneasiness,
which is felt by the middle and lower classes in the cities. In the
Roman Empire, on the other hand, it produced a historical catastrophe.”
All that is true, without a doubt, but precisely on this account ought
the lesson, with which the history of the fall of the Roman Empire is
pregnant, to be read and pondered.
In the Roman Empire, too, for a long time, just as now in Europe and
America, this excessive urbanisation only occasioned a by-no-means
intolerable material uneasiness to the most numerous and poorest
classes of town-dweller. In the first and second centuries,—that is
to say, in the two most prosperous and splendid centuries of the
Empire,—numerous inscriptions remind us of gifts made by rich citizens
or precautions taken by the cities to meet the scarcity of victuals
which pressed hard upon the poorer classes. It is scarcely necessary
to mention Rome in this connection, so notorious is the fact. From the
day when it became the metropolis of a vast Empire, the scarcity of
victuals became a permanent feature of the city; and the State had to
furnish the city with the famous _frumentationes_, which were, in the
last two centuries of the Republic and throughout the Empire, one of
Rome’s most serious preoccupations. Mistress of a mighty Empire, Rome
was for centuries sure of being obeyed in the most distant provinces by
the people that her sword had conquered; but there was never a day in
the year when she was sure of keeping the wolf from the door!
In the Roman Empire also, then, for a long time the excessive
urbanisation made itself felt in the shape of a troublesome, but by no
means intolerable, rise in the cost of living in the cities. Why did it
gradually bring about a terrific social dissolution? Because the Roman
Empire, instead of leaving its cities to fight down this evil, tried to
abolish it by artificial means; and those artificial means it applied
ever more and more extensively, the more serious the evil became.
The crisis of the cities of the Empire began in the third century,
which saw the depopulation of the countryside, and the diminution
of agricultural production, while in the cities, on the other hand,
victuals were rising in price, and the number of beggars was increasing
in a most alarming way. If the State had allowed this crisis to run its
natural course, what would have happened? Of course things would of
themselves have regained their equilibrium little by little. Part of
the urban proletariat, unable to live in the overcrowded cities, and
seeing themselves condemned to a sort of chronic famine and gradual
extinction, would have returned to work in the fields. When the drain
on the population of the countryside becomes too great, the evil admits
of only one remedy: and that is, that life in the cities should be
allowed to become unbearable to a certain number of the citizens, so
that they may be tempted to exchange it for life and work in the fields.
But the Roman State could not bring itself to let the evil follow its
natural course. The large cities, beginning with Rome, had too great
influence with the Government; and throughout the Empire the city
beautiful and rich had come to represent the model of civilisation.
Little by little, the State let itself be persuaded to do for each
of its cities what it had done for Rome ever since its earliest
conception of a world-policy under the delusion that it could thus
stave off the impending crisis. With a view to easing the misery of the
urban proletariat, it took public works in hand in every direction,
regardless of their utility. It distributed victuals free or at
half-price. It multiplied philanthropic institutions and encouraged the
wealthy families to imitate and to assist it. But all these schemes
cost money, which the State could secure only by increasing the
taxes on agriculture, while the wealthy families had to spend in the
cities the bulk of the wealth which they derived from their country
property. The result was that life was artificially made easier and
more comfortable in the cities, and harder and more difficult in the
country, whereas the natural trend of circumstances would have produced
the opposite effect. The evil, treated in so ridiculous a way, became
worse. The exodus of the peasants into the cities increased, and
brought a corresponding increase in the demands on the public purse for
the amelioration of the conditions of city life. The intensification of
the evil was met by an increase in the dose of the very remedy which
aggravated it—useless expenditure in the cities, ruinous taxes on
agriculture. Matters went from worse to worse, until the system reached
the limit of its elasticity, and the whole social fabric collapsed in a
colossal catastrophe.
This is precisely the mistake which modern civilisation must learn to
avoid. The catastrophe of the Roman Empire teaches us moderns one
lesson: and that is, that the evil from which the great cities of the
civil world are suffering at present is a salutary, health-giving, and
beneficent visitation. For it puts a natural brake on the growth of
cities and of their luxury, and keeps the population in the fields,
where the rise in the price of living brings profit, greater comfort,
and improved living in its train. It is, in short, the _vis medicatrix
naturæ_, which tends to restore the balance between agriculture and
industry, between the city and the country, a balance which the
development of modern civilisation has upset. Therefore all the
artificial measures which pretend to mitigate this evil, at the very
moment when the force of circumstances demands that this development
shall stop, must be pernicious. While they tide over a trifling evil of
the moment, they lay up for the future troubles and difficulties and
dangers of infinitely greater gravity.
Even if modern civilisation adopted in its entirety the policy pursued
by the Roman Empire, and tried to eradicate the evil with the same
deadly artificial measures which only aggravated it, there would
still doubtless be no ground for fearing a catastrophe in the future
analogous to that which overwhelmed Greco-Roman civilisation. Modern
civilisation is too vast, too powerful, too deep-rooted, to have any
fear of a similar fate. But if not destroyed, modern civilisation
might be profoundly shaken and weakened in the event of its imitating
the policy of Rome and seeking to favour the cities overmuch at the
expense of the country;—all the more shaken and weakened, because,
dazzled as we all are by the triumphs of the world in which we live,
and by the surface marks of its powers and grandeur, it is much more
difficult for us than it was for the ancients in a similar case to
discern the signs of old age in it, and the cracks which are spreading
in the edifice in which we live.
There is a further lesson to be learned by us moderns from the history
of the decadence of the Roman Empire: and that is, not to mistake the
glamour of the external manifestations of wealth and power for signs of
real wealth and power. A civilisation is not always in reality richer
and stronger in times when it bears the most visible marks of so being;
we are rather apt to find that, when it is most dazzling in outward
seeming, its decadence has already begun. We often halt in stupefaction
and admiration before the great ruins of ancient Rome, especially those
offered by the European provinces of the Empire. We think how great,
powerful, and rich must have been the Empire which could rear monuments
so massive that all the centuries have not been able to sweep them
entirely from the face of the earth. And yet, if we are to look at
these relics in their right light, we must remember that practically
all the great Roman monuments whose remains survive to our day on a
large scale, belong to the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the
Christian era—to the centuries of decadence and dissolution. As the
Empire weakens and ages, its monuments become more and more elaborate
and colossal. A fairly safe rule for guessing the century to which
Roman monuments belong is to assume that the more imposing the ruins,
the later is the epoch to which they should be attributed.
For Rome herself, the time of the greatest expansion, splendour,
and population was the middle of the fourth century—that is to say,
when her decadence was already far advanced. Not till then did Rome
become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of
her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of
her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most
marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration
of the whole world. How much smaller, on the other hand, how much more
simple and modest was she in the first century, a time when the Empire
really was at its most flourishing epoch, with its frontiers safe,
its population on the up-grade, its cities developing themselves by a
process of growth which was still a perfectly natural one, agriculture,
trade, and industries in a sound condition, and the State well
organised and strong.
Nor is this a historical paradox. It is only what always happens to a
greater or less extent. In families as in nations and civilisations,
ostentation, display, the doing on a grand scale everything, even
what might be done on a small scale without detriment, or even
advantageously, are a sign of decadence rather than of progress. The
passion for the colossal and the enormous is not a healthy passion,
nor does it flourish in epochs of strength and sound moral and social
equilibrium; it is a passion which thrives in epochs of decadence,
epochs convulsed by a deep-seated disproportion between desires and
reality, a thirst for excitements and violent sensations, lavish in the
expenditure of labour and of wealth to procure a fallacious illusion
of grandeur and power, spurred on by a spirit of rivalry and of
competition which easily degenerates into false pride.
Not the least of the causes contributing to the maintenance and
increase in the ancient cities of that sumptuousness of festivals,
ceremonies, and monuments which gradually ruined the Roman Empire was
the rivalry between the big, the medium-sized, and the small cities of
the Empire, between provinces and districts, between classes, families,
professions, sects, and religions. When a city built a theatre, or
baths, or a basilica, at once her sister-cities wanted one too, as big
or bigger. If a rich family built or endowed a temple or baths, the
other families wished to do the same or more. There was a continual
competition between the religions to have the finest temple or the most
sumptuous ceremonial. That explains why a little city like Verona, for
instance, has an enormous amphitheatre, in which the whole population
of the city could be accommodated several times over. That explains why
the provinces, the cities and private individuals, in this competition
of display and magnificence, all showered enormous wealth on that
display, wealth which would have been better spent in defending the
Empire or in preserving its economic resources. Many of those remains
which evoke our admiration to-day meant, in the days when they reared
their proud bulk to the sky, the ruin of the Empire!
And now let us search our own consciences. Can we honestly declare
that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display,
this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the
ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked
its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose
that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who
remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever
swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency
to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for
the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. Whoever casts his eyes around him,
in America as well as in Europe, sees this impression gaining ground
on all sides and acquiring force. It fouls the stream of politics,
religion, literature, philosophy and art. It corrupts or transforms
the spirit of the upper as well as of the lower classes. Not only
that, but there is a prevailing tendency to consider this impression
a sign of force, a proof of greatness and of progress. The history of
Rome admonishes us, then, to distrust this illusion, and to sound the
spirit of our civilisation to its deepest depths—that spirit which to
us seems a limpid mirror of perfection, while it is really very much
the opposite. If, after twenty centuries of work and study, we find
ourselves, fortunate heirs of an ancient civilisation, in a position to
live more safely and more comfortably than did our ancestors on this
little globe, we are not, therefore, justified in altering the moral
values and virtues to suit our pleasures. The vices, the faults, the
depraved inclinations of twenty centuries ago remain the same to-day
and modern civilisation would be guilty of the gravest of errors if,
deaf to the great lesson preached by the ruins of Rome, she boasted
of those very defects which destroyed in the ancient world one of the
greatest works of human brain and energy that history has to offer.
V
UPS AND DOWNS
We are always talking about progress. But does “progress” mean only
the multiplication of wealth and of the power and speed of machines,
in other words, of our mastery over nature? This would be a rash
assertion. “Progress” implies further improvement of, and increase
in, the virtues, and the diminution of the vices inherent in human
nature. Now, can anyone who knows the history of ancient civilisation,
the life, the customs, the ideas, and the moral outlook of the Greeks
and Romans, say that we have become better than they? And if he can
say so, how much better have we become? Have we become better in
every department of life, or are there some things in which we show a
falling-off?
There can be no doubt that we are braver than the ancients. Our control
of fire has obliged us to be continually making calls upon our bravery.
The formidable machines which we set in motion; the explosives which we
use so largely; the murderous forces of nature, like electricity, which
we have brought into subservience; the thousand dangerous exploits on
the sea, in the bowels of the earth, and in the giddy heights of the
air in which thousands, nay millions, of engineers and workmen daily
risk their lives, have steeled our temperaments to quell that blind and
instinctive fear which lies deep down in human nature.
War is the supreme test of this increased courage. War has become
rarer, it is true, than it was in the ancient world; but how much more
terrible and awe-inspiring has it become, both by land and by sea,
since fire replaced steel as the principal weapon! The only forms
of fire known to the ancients as useful in war were boiling oil,
which was often used in sieges, and the so-called Greek fire, which
was employed in naval battles—a mysterious compound, into which one
suspects, petroleum entered, for it was much used by the nations and
cities of the Black Sea. But both of these were but children’s toys
compared with the guns, shrapnel, and torpedoes of modern warfare. We
are justified, therefore, in asserting that the men who took part in
the battles of Marathon, Cannæ, and Zama did not need to have hearts
so stout or courage so intrepid as the men who faced each other in the
great battles of the Napoleonic era, in the American Civil War, in the
battles between the Russians and Japanese, or in the recent Balkan War.
But if we are more courageous, we are at the same time less cruel, a
fact which throws our superior courage into greater relief. One of
the characteristic differences between contemporary civilisation and
those which preceded it, up to the French Revolution, is the total
suppression of the bloody spectacles which, under so many aspects and
forms, were one of the most sinister delights of our ancestors. We
find the greatest difficulty in understanding how so highly civilised
a people as the Romans, with so many thoughts and feelings in common
with ourselves, could have been roused to such a pitch of intoxication
by the games of gladiators and the baiting of wild beasts. And yet the
popular passion for these bloody games was such that even the emperors,
in whom they inspired feelings of horror and repulsion, like Augustus,
were compelled to attend the gory spectacles, so as not to appear, by
their absence, to rebuke those who supported them and to run counter to
the absorbing passion of the masses for them.
On the other hand, if an ancient Roman came back to the world, and
saw an American stadium packed with people from top to bottom, he
would be not a little puzzled to explain what could have induced so
many thousands of persons to have flocked together from afar merely
to watch a football match,—to collect in such crowds, endure such a
long journey, and such discomfort, just to get a distant view of some
youths kicking their legs in the air! It would seem to them a truly
insipid and tiresome spectacle. Their tastes ran to a gory struggle,
reminiscent of war, to fights between men and animals, blood in
bucketfuls.
Christianity initiated that education of men’s feelings which has
made us gradually turn away our eyes in horror from these atrocious
diversions. But how slow and difficult this education has been! It
can safely be said not to have reached its climax until after the
Revolution. Only the nineteenth century, intent on mitigating and
humanising the penal law in every direction, has finally succeeded in
abolishing the last of these cruel spectacles, capital punishment.
Right up to the end of the eighteenth century, condemned prisoners were
executed throughout Europe with much pomp and in the full light of day,
in the central squares of the cities, at times and places at which
everybody could attend, as if at a public festival. Indeed, executions
were invariably attended by an immense public, attracted by cruel
curiosity to see a man going to his death. By diminishing the number
of death sentences, and by executing culprits in prison yards in the
presence of a handful of witnesses, or, as is still done in France, in
public, but at dawn, with the public kept at as great a distance as
possible, the nineteenth century has put the crown on one of the most
far-reaching and wonderful moral transformations of the human mind,
a transformation which owes its birth to the words of Christ uttered
twenty centuries ago, and has given modern civilisation one notable
reason for boasting itself superior to the ancient.
But if we are more courageous and more humane, we are, on the other
hand, in no way more sober or more temperate. As far as these virtues
are concerned, the ancient world cuts a much better figure in history
than does the modern. We have deteriorated. The modern world eats
and drinks to excess. It indulges to excess in alcoholic drinks and
stimulants. The only intoxicating drinks known to the ancients were
wine and beer, and wine they always drank mixed with water. They did
not know alcohol, nor consequently, liqueurs, now so numerous and so
highly appreciated; they did not know tea, coffee, or tobacco. We can
assert positively that drunkenness was the rarest of vices in the
ancient world, while frugality was the commonest of virtues. We need
not take too seriously those orgies of the wealthy to which ancient
writers—especially Latin writers—so often allude, or the banquets at
which dishes of parrots’ tongues were served, or pearls dissolved in
vinegar were drunk. These stories bear a strong family likeness to
the legends current in Europe about “the corrupt state of American
society,” and are due to the same tendency. They are the exaggerated
and violent reaction of an ancient puritanism against the natural
advances of luxury and against that kind of moral slackening which
always accompanies the increase of wealth. Just as the dispassionate
and unprejudiced European, when he examines at close-quarters the
so-called “corrupt state of American society,” readily recognises
that the high-sounding expression only indicates certain defects and
weaknesses which certainly are reprehensible, but which are common to
the whole of modern civilisation and not peculiar to America, so the
famous Roman orgies and the banquets, which have made so much stir,
would seem to us, if a miracle allowed us to attend them, very modest
and unassuming affairs compared to our ostentatious displays.
As far, then, as sobriety and temperance are concerned, we cannot
confront our ancestors with too haughty a mien. And what shall we say
about the purity of our customs? That is a much more difficult problem,
perhaps an absolutely insoluble one. At least I, for my part, do not
feel myself competent to solve it. To judge from Greco-Latin literature
and art, one would say that in the ancient world, with the exception of
a few countries and certain epochs, such as the centuries during which
Rome was controlled by a puritan aristocracy, the customs of both men
and women were very free and easy. But literature and art often afford
untrustworthy evidence on which to base a judgment as to the customs
of an epoch. For vice, wrong, and crime, though they may shock the
moral sense, are more interesting subjects for art than are virtue and
honesty. In short, literature and art always seek to describe what is
rare, exceptional, and dramatic. Therefore, if we wish to judge the
moral state of an epoch from its literature and art, we must know how
far and in what degree the faults and vices described or chosen for
artistic representation are common, what is the rule, and how many are
the exceptions. And how are we to find this out? We shall have to know
the moral state of the epoch, and literature will not help us to this
knowledge.
Anybody who judged Paris from the novels or dramas which deal with
Parisian life would be forced to conclude that the French metropolis
spends the whole of its time in amorous adventures. But anyone who
_knows_ Paris is aware, what is after all an _a priori_ supposition,
that love occupies in its life a very much less prominent place than in
its literature; and that the writers of dramas and novels go to love
for their subject by preference, because love admits of more attractive
treatment than do struggles for money or the rivalries of political
ambitions and the crosses of the intellectual life. For the rest, when
we wish to judge the customs of an epoch or of a people, we must not
forget that it is not always the epochs or the nations which lament
most loudly the depravity of customs that are the most corrupt. Far
from it! Often the epochs which bewail their own vices most bitterly
are those in which the moral conscience is still lively and robust and,
therefore, protests against the evil. The epochs which are dumb, and
seem most virtuous, have often reached such a pitch of depravity, that
they have become indifferent to the evil.
A striking instance of this curious phenomenon is to be found in the
history of Rome. Horrible stories are told of the first period of
the Empire,—extending from Augustus to Nero,—during which the family
of the Julio-Claudii were at the helm of the State. History and
literature are full of scandals, and of laments over the depravity of
the times. In the second period, on the other hand,—that of the Flavii
and Antonines,—the scandals and protests cease. The depravity of the
preceding century seems suddenly to have mysteriously disappeared. The
Roman world has, by a kind of miraculous conversion, in a few years
turned virtuous. In fact, not a few historians have thought that this
miracle did come about, and have credited it to the virtuous emperors
of the second century. After so many bad emperors, Rome at last got
some good ones; and the trick was done! But anybody who studies the
facts with a little patience will have no hesitation in concluding that
the times of the Antonines were at least as corrupt as those of the
Julio-Claudii; but that, while in the first century of the Christian
era the ancient Puritan spirit of Rome was still alive and vigorous,
and therefore protested against the deterioration of customs with such
energy that its protests have reached even to our ears, in the epoch of
the Antonines, on the other hand, this spirit was spent. Consequently,
everybody resigned himself to the evil, either despairing of being able
to cure it, or not giving it a thought. And so, of the two epochs,
that which was painted in the blacker colours was, perhaps, really the
better.
It is impossible, then, to decide whether our customs are better or
worse than those of the ancients. It is certain, on the other hand,
that we are much more human than they. For with us, a sentiment, which
with the ancients was very weak, if not non-existent, is lively and
profound, the sentiment of the moral equality of every individual.
The ancients simply refused to recognise in the slave and in the free
man, in the nobleman and in the plebeian, in the citizen and in the
foreigner, human creatures made of the same clay and animated by the
same spirit, whom the mysterious accidents of fortune had placed in
different situations, and all of whom had certain sacred and inviolable
rights in the supreme domain of justice. A few philosophers dared just
to hint at such doctrines, but without laying too much stress upon
them. And theirs were voices crying in the wilderness. The free man,
the patrician, and the citizen felt themselves creatures of another
species and of a higher nature than slaves, plebeians, and foreigners,
towards whom the former group might have capricious bursts of
benevolence, but to whom they never regarded themselves as bound by any
obligation. Hence came that asperity which appears in all the social
relations of ancient peoples,—in their laws, their customs, their wars,
their political quarrels,—and which often seems to us in so striking
a contrast with the lofty and noble culture which adorned the ancient
states.
Augustus, for instance, was a grave, well-balanced, and prudent man,
who avoided all extremes. Yet the ancient writers tell us to his credit
that he had amongst his numerous freedmen several men of the loftiest
intellect, of wide knowledge, and of transparent honesty, who had
rendered him great services; but that, though he held them in great
honour, he never invited any of them to his table. Such an act of
familiarity between freedmen and patricians would have seemed to the
ancients derogatory, and so they praised Augustus for having avoided
it. To us, on the other hand, this attitude of reserve on the part of
the great Emperor seems strange and incomprehensible, as it would seem
on the part of a great and wealthy manufacturer who was ashamed to dine
with the heads of departments of his business.
On the other hand, the difference between rich and poor was much
less marked in the ancient world than it is in the modern. This is,
perhaps, the most striking and important of the lines of cleavage
between the world of antiquity and that of to-day. The idea of the
moral equality of men, who are all sons of God, which was disseminated
by Christianity; the idea of political and social equality, which was
promulgated by the French Revolution, have in modern civilisation
cut at the roots of the ancient distinctions of class, of religion,
and even to a certain extent of nationality. But modern society is
organising itself, in compensation, into a hierarchy of wealth. Men may
consider themselves in theory all equal to one another; but each tries
to associate with those persons who have approximately the same means
as he, because it is they who are able to have the same habits as he
has. Precisely because the modern world is so rich and so luxurious,
the modes of living among the richest, the rich, and the moderately
well-to-do classes show striking differences. And what is true of the
modes of living is also true of tastes and inclinations. Everybody
realises nowadays that differences or resemblances in habits, tastes,
and inclinations are what most attract and repel men and influence them
in treating each other as equals or unequals, when custom and tradition
have established no other moral difference between them. The motor-car
is as powerful a barrier between the social classes of to-day as was
aristocratic prejudice before the Revolution.
In ancient times, on the other hand, precisely because the world was
then so much poorer and simpler, the difference in the mode of living
between poor and rich was much smaller. Both lived in closer contact,
treating each other really as equals, provided always that they were of
the same rank socially and politically. Augustus, who could not have
freedmen, however enlightened, to dinner, invited poor, but free-born,
plebeians. A rich Roman would never have entertained a freedman in his
house or at his table, or treated him as an equal, even if the latter
had been as rich as, or richer than, himself. On the other hand, he
welcomed and treated as an equal a citizen free-born like himself,
however miserable and reduced to living on his bounty.
If, therefore, the ancient conception of the social relations was less
humane and less generous than ours, it was not wanting in a certain
moral grandeur that is wanting to ours, inasmuch as in estimating a
man, it subordinated his wealth to ideal qualities, such as free
birth, or good birth, or citizenship. So it maintained in society
certain moral values which were not to be bought with money. The
poorest of Roman citizens was conscious and proud of possessing
something of inestimable value, which the richest and most opulent of
Roman freedmen could not acquire for all his wealth; and this sentiment
was a very real alleviation of, and compensation for, his poverty. Dare
we assert that in this respect our social system does not fall short of
the ancient one? Such an assertion would be, in my opinion, a very bold
one. The gravest weakness in modern society consists precisely in this
continual increase of the power of money, as an all-regulating force
and universal standard. If the social evolution which we are witnessing
continues on the path on which it has started, in a short time there
will be nothing in life worth having which is not purchasable for
money; and then what means will there be left of bridling the greed and
envy of the poor?
But this superiority of ancient society was in its turn the effect
of a different conception of wealth, of its rights, its duties, and
its objects. It is an exaggeration to credit the ancients with a
simplicity and a contempt for riches, qualities which serve as a
strange contrast with the greed and the insatiable thirst for gold
which possess the moderns. In ancient times, it is true, men preached
moderation in desires and taught the art of being contented with but
little, with greater zeal and success than it is taught in modern
times. Nevertheless, the men of those days, with but few exceptions,
were not less greedy than we, and not less apt to consider wealth as
the greatest of life’s blessings. Those who could, accumulated large
private fortunes with the same frenzy and the same insatiate greed that
inflame so many speculators and business men of the present day; and
many of those who were content to live the simple life were converts
to this noble and lofty philosophy from necessity rather than from
conviction. The wealth of the ancient world was infinitely smaller than
that of the modern world. Consequently a large number of persons had
to be content to live the simple life. On this account the religions
and the philosophers invented many theories and doctrines to prove that
simplicity and parsimony were more desirable than opulence and luxury.
That is the reason for the numberless theories regarding austerity that
antiquity invented.
But though the ancients desired riches as much as we do, they were not
infatuated by the desire to multiply them to the same extent as the
moderns. In this respect, the ancients may truly be said to have been
more austere and disinterested than we. And the difference between
their thoughts and feelings on the subject and our own is seen most
strikingly in one fundamental principle, which is, as it were, the
keystone of the whole fabric of ideas and sentiments which concern
riches; I mean, the question of putting money out at interest. To
modern society it seems the most natural thing in the world that
money should earn interest. Nowadays, the number of those who lend
or invest capital in the countless ways offered by modern finance is
infinite. Every one of these big and little capitalists, who possess
State bonds, shares in railways or industrials, or bank or commercial
securities, would be thunderstruck if anyone told him that he was
behaving in an unseemly way. Matters have reached a point at which the
distinction between investment and usury is fading from our minds.
And yet numberless generations, and not a few of the most brilliant
civilisations in history, professed the idea that any business of
that sort was unbecoming. The ancients as a rule, with but few casual
exceptions, judged it unfitting for a man of the respectable classes to
earn money in any other way than either from land and houses—realty—or
from direct participation in commerce and the arts; never from money
lent at interest to others. That was usury; and was considered nearly
always, with but few exceptions of time and place, as the exercise of
a degrading profession. Wealthy men, with large sums of money at their
disposal, were able, and were expected, to help those who needed money;
but with gratuitous, not with interest-bearing loans. The letters
of Cicero, for instance, are full of references to these gratuitous
loans, for which the great orator, when short of money, often asked his
friends. When he was in funds, he lent to those who were in need. In
short, the lending of money without interest to upright and honourable
persons was considered in those days a duty of the rich.
Of course, ideas like these about money and interest were bound to
retard the development of the ancient world and the increase of
wealth. But they were ideas which kept alive in men’s minds a certain
noble disinterestedness of which it would be difficult to find traces
to-day, and which makes amends for many of the asperities of ancient
civilisation.
Considering, then, the separate virtues one by one, we find that in
some we have progressed, in others we have not. Therefore, in certain
respects we are better than the ancients, in others we are worse.
Must we conclude that the good and the evil balance each other, and
that, therefore, there has been no real moral progress from the
ancient world to the modern? That would be, in my opinion, a very bold
assertion. It is, in fact, undeniable that our moral life is richer in
principles than that of the ancients, because we have retained many of
the ancient principles, and have added to them the moral principles
which were invented by the civilisations which flourished after the
fall of the Roman Empire. We appreciate the virtues of patriotism,
civic affection, and valour in war which were proper to the ancient
cities. To them we add the sense of legality and right, the need for
precise and prompt justice, which were invented by the ancient jurists
and perfected by the moderns. We add charity, mercy, love of our
neighbour, horror of cruel amusements, virtues which Christ taught us.
We add the sentiment of the dignity and the rights of man, which was
created by the philosophy of the eighteenth century and by the French
Revolution. We add certain other brand-new sentiments, the creation
of the civilisation of machinery, which are, therefore, stronger in
America than in Europe: ardour for the new, enthusiasm for progress,
confidence in our own strength. In war, we fight like the Romans, and
in peace, we turn our eyes away from bloody spectacles. We should hold
the gladiatorial games in no whit less horror than the most pious of
Christian monks. We trade like the Phœnicians and we love knowledge
like the Greeks. We appreciate liberty and we appreciate authority.
Does not all this constitute real progress? And does it not suffice to
counterbalance certain other defects of ours, such as intemperance and
the immoderate desire for riches?
I think so. But that does not mean that we are at liberty to abandon
ourselves freely to our vices and defects, under the pretext that
they are compensated for by other virtues. It is the duty of every
civilisation, as of every man, to make himself as perfect as possible.
And this duty we must not forget, not even in the midst of the
immeasurable triumphs of the richest, most powerful, and wisest
civilisation that has ever yet seen the light of day.