The ancients then abstained from inventing and constructing machines, not from lack of knowledge but from lack of will. The effort seemed to them useless, nay, pernicious; and the enterprise did not attract them. It remains, therefore, to consider why the ancients, in their great struggle to extend the dominion of man over nature, felt no need of help from swift engines of iron, and, therefore, did not make the effort necessary to invent them. This is a question of the highest importance for the history of civilisation, for by its solution only can we gain an insight into what is perhaps the most profound difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The difference consists in this: while our civilisation is a mechanical-scientific civilisation, the ancient was above all things an artistic civilisation. Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in consumption, and therefore in production. If we are to grasp the very essence of our history, we must understand clearly how indisolubly united are the artistic civilisation and the ideal of a simple life, the mechanical-scientific civilisation and the ideal of a life of extravagance and luxury. Even at the present day, many will be found to extol the greatness, the wealth, and the might of the Roman Empire as a marvel never surpassed in history. But this is a delusion. The Roman Empire seemed marvellously wealthy and powerful to the ancients, because they had never yet seen greater wealth and greater might. But what are the wealth and the might of the Roman Empire compared with the might and the wealth of the great modern states of Europe and America? One observation will suffice to give an idea of the difference. We are justified in deducing from the great number of facts and data in our possession that in the most flourishing and wealthy centuries the budget of the Empire, the sum total, that is, of all the items of expenditure which the central government at Rome had to meet—expenditure on the most important public services of so immense an empire, which comprised the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa—fell short, far short, of the municipal budget of the city of New York. Only the man who is conversant with the customs of the past in their minutest details can fully estimate how much simpler, poorer, and more economical the civilisation of the ancients was than that which has permeated America and Europe since the invention of the steam-engine and electricity, when the riches of the New World, exploited intensively with the help of machinery, began to flood the earth.