Suetonius recounts that one day a man presented himself to the Emperor Vespasian, and showed him the models of a machine, thanks to which the Emperor could have finished off the construction of certain of his great public works with fewer labourers, and at a great saving of expense. Vespasian was full of praise for the man’s ingenuity, and recompensed him with a sum of money; but he subsequently had the model destroyed, saying that he did not wish to have any machines which would cause his people to go hungry. Applying the standard of modern ideas, how should we judge this sentiment and act? Of course, we should consider it a strange and absurd mistake. Suetonius, on the contrary, quotes the incident to prove how wise Vespasian was. In this divergence of opinion is revealed the essential difference between ourselves and the ancients, between modern civilisation and Greco-Roman civilisation, for all that these resemble each other in so many particulars; the principal difference between the ancient world and America. Although, as I have shown in my preceding essay, America in certain of its institutions and forms of social life resembles the ancient world more than Europe, this comparison does not hold true so far as the instruments of economic production are concerned. In this respect America is much further removed from the ancient world than is Europe, and represents to-day the beginning of a new era and a new civilisation, whose spirit and tendencies would be quite incomprehensible to a re-embodied Greek or Roman.