Mr. Adams’s book, however, is far more than a mere succession of brilliant episodes. He fully sees that the value of facts lies in their relation to one another; and from the facts as he sees them he deduces certain laws with more than a Thucydidean indifference as to his own individual approval or disapproval of the development. The life of nations, like any other form of life, is but one manifestation of energy; and Mr. Adams’s decidedly gloomy philosophy of life may be gathered from the fact that he places fear and greed as the two forms of energy which stand conspicuously predominant; fear in the earlier, and greed in the later, stages of evolution from barbarism to civilization. Civilization itself he regards merely as the history of the movement from a condition of physical distribution to one of physical concentration. During the earlier stages of this movement the imaginative man--the man who stands in fear of a priesthood--is, in his opinion, the representative type, while with him, and almost equally typical, stand the soldier and the artist. As consolidation advances, the economic man--the man of industry, trade, and capital--tends to supplant the emotional and artistic types of manhood, and finally himself develops along two lines,--“the usurer in his most formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutriment.” These two very unattractive types are, in his belief, the inevitable final products of all civilization, as civilization has hitherto developed; and when they have once been produced there follows either a stationary period, during which the whole body politic gradually ossifies and atrophies, or else a period of utter disintegration. This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many respects an entirely false theory; but nevertheless there is in it a very ugly element of truth. One does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams’s theories or all his facts in order to recognize more than one disagreeable resemblance between the world as it is to-day, and the Roman world under the Empire, or the Greek world under the successors of Alexander. Where he errs is in his failure to appreciate the fundamental differences which utterly destroy any real parallelism between the two sets of cases. Indeed, his zeal in championing his theories leads him at times into positions which are seen at a glance to be untenable.