But to satisfy a public which is so greedy of reading, an extraordinary number of writers is required at the present day, from the obscure editors of provincial journals to the favoured few who succeed in winning world-fame, and in reaching the position of sovereigns or, if you prefer it, satraps of literature. And all this enormous multitude of writers is compelled to write prolifically and rapidly, because the public wants to read voraciously. It must choose diverse topics, and vary its themes according to the varieties of fashion and events. On the other hand, it is no longer compelled to be concise, both because the public often likes prolixity, which makes reading comfortable and easy, and because, nowadays, printing is so cheap and facile. But the art of writing is being lost through this haste, this instability of public interest, this prolixity. Every tongue is becoming a muddy mixture of words and phrases which have dripped from every point of heaven on to the daily language and literature. Taste is being corrupted, with writers as with readers, deteriorating now into negligence and carelessness, now into affectation and grotesqueness. * * * * * Quality and quantity: these are the two principles of the two civilisations, the ancient and the modern. They are two opposite principles, a circumstance which explains why in the last fifty years the gradual triumph of the civilisation of machinery or of industry on a large scale, which aims at multiplying the quantity of riches, has been accompanied by a decline in classical studies. The new generation, even that portion of it that represents the educated classes, has broken away from the study of a world which, though resembling the modern world in so many of its ideas and institutions, differed from the present era in the fundamental conception of life, and professed an entirely different idea of perfection. However, if the two principles are mutually exclusive, we must ask ourselves, which is true and which false, which is good and which is not. Who is in the right,—we, who wish to fill the world with riches, even at the cost of disfiguring it and making it hideous; or the ancients, who were content to live a life of greater simplicity, of more leisurely and more peaceful activity, but wished to spend it in a persevering effort to materialise their ideals of beauty? In how many of the confused disputes which set the men of our times by the ears is this problem obscurely implied, though the disputants are unaware of it? But the problem is a terrible one, because it involves all the fundamental problems of contemporary life and the very destiny of the gigantic operations to which our own generation, and those which preceded it, have applied themselves with such frenzied activity.