The civilisations from which our own is sprung were poor indeed. They set limits to their desires, their ambitions, their spirit of initiative, their audacity, their originality. They brought forth slowly and a little at a time, and suffered continuously from the insufficiency of their material resources. They looked upon the amassing of wealth merely as a painful necessity; but, in all things, they sought to attain the difficult model of perfection, whether in art, or in literature, or in the realms of morality and religion. The aristocratic character of almost all the industries of the past, the importance which was formerly bestowed on the decorative arts and on all questions of personal morality, ceremonial, and form—these are all proofs of it. It was Quality, not Quantity, which carried our forefathers forward. All the limitations to which these civilisations were subject, so astonishing to us to-day, were only the necessary cost of these perfections which men once so ardently desired. We have turned upside down the world our ancestors lived in. We have made our goal the multiplication of riches. We have won liberty, but we have been obliged to abandon almost all the ancient ideals of perfection, sacrificing Quality in everything. How many of the difficulties which torture this brilliant period of ours so cruelly are the result of this duel between Quality and Quantity! Look, for example, at the present crisis in the study of the classics. Why did men formerly study Homer and Cicero with passionate zeal? Because, in those days, the great Greek and Latin writers were the models of that literary perfection, so greatly admired by the influential classes, which was not merely an ornament of the mind. The attainment of perfection often carried with it the admiration of the public, fame, sometimes even glory and high rank. In this last century, however, these models have lost much of their prestige, either on account of the multitude of literatures which have come to be known and liked, or because they have proved troublesome to a period compelled to write too much and too quickly. Just imagine a candidate for the presidency of the United States who should pronounce ten or fifteen long orations daily and who should in each discourse show himself the perfect orator according to the rules of Cicero or Quintilian! The day when classical culture ceased to be an official school of literary taste, on that day it was condemned to die; and scientific philology, which we have sought to set up in its place, can only serve to bury its corpse. No longer models for posterity, the books of the ancient authors have become like any others, and are less interesting for the majority of readers than the works of modern literatures.