Naturally, my earliest studies in Roman history led me to fix my attention on this bountiful munificence on the part of private persons in the ancient world, by which the rich, either spontaneously or at the call of public opinion, took upon themselves a share of the public burdens. But I had not fully grasped the meaning of this system, until I visited America, and saw the colleges, schools, and hospitals founded and subsidised, the museums and universities endowed, and all the other public institutions aided with millions of dollars by the rich business men and bankers of America. For Europeans, living on a continent where nowadays the State has almost monopolised these functions and exercises them zealously, seeming to resent the interference of private persons, it is difficult to picture correctly a social system in which private generosity is at once possible and necessary, the advantages by which such generosity is accompanied, and the manner in which it is exercised. * * * * * The munificence of the wealthy citizens is only a special instance of a more general and more extensive phenomenon in which America approaches more nearly to the ancient world than Europe; I mean, in that her society is less essentially bureaucratic. In the ancient world, there was no bureaucratic organisation in any of the Greco-Asiatic monarchies founded by Alexander or in the latest period of the Roman Empire which could be considered to resemble even remotely, on a smaller scale and merely in broad outlines, that which flourishes in the Europe of to-day. Now, in the most splendid moments of Greek and Roman history, we find states in which all the public functions, even the executive ones, were elective; so that they all changed periodically according to the whims of an electoral body. The need for technical training and professional education for the exercise of certain executive functions was so little recognised that even the command of the military forces and the chief magistracy were filled by public election. A general became a general, not in the course of his professional career, but at the will of the people, assembled in the _comitia_; and with generals chosen in this way, Rome conquered the world. It is impossible to imagine a social constitution in more striking contradiction to the social constitution of contemporary Europe, which entrusts all the executive functions to a bureaucracy professionally trained, formed into a rigid hierarchy, and dependent on the State, over which the people have practically no power. Men in Europe become generals or judges because they have studied the art of war or law in special schools, not because the majority of an electoral body have thought it opportune to entrust the office to an individual who has been clever enough to appeal to them more strongly than do his rivals.