This assertion may seem paradoxical and strange. What! are we moderns on the downward grade? Why, one hears of nothing but progress on every side. Never was there an epoch more proud of its loudly vaunted achievements. The sciences are adding discovery to discovery. The wealth of the world is increasing with giddy rapidity. Comfort and culture are spreading in every class and in every country. One after another, most recondite treasures of the earth are falling into our hands. We are gradually fighting down all the forces of nature which for so long a time kept our ancestors at a distance, impeded them, even threatened them with death, from the law of gravity to the most insidious maladies. Is it permissible to talk of decadence at the very moment when man has made himself lord of the whole earth, and is even learning to fly? History cannot show a richer, wiser, more powerful, more daring epoch than the present one. No wonder that most people would resent the suggestion that we, in the flush of our brilliant successes, are seeing the repetition of that ancient and terrible history of the last centuries of the Roman Empire, which was one of the saddest and deadliest episodes in the world’s history. And yet that history is repeating itself, to a certain extent at any rate. The showy wealth and the noisy triumphs of modern civilisation veil, but do not hide, this _recommencement de l’histoire_ from him who studies, in a spirit of philosophy, our times and the decadence of the Roman Empire. It is true that there are immense differences between the two civilisations and the two epochs. But notwithstanding these differences, what wonderful resemblances there are! Consider especially that disease which corrupted the trunk of the Roman Empire, and which is beginning slowly, subtly, insidiously to eat the heart out of the modern world. The disease which killed the Roman Empire was, in fact, excessive urbanisation. Neither the attacks of barbarism from outside, nor those of Christianity from within, would have prevailed against its might and its massive weight, if the strength of the colossus had not been already undermined by this internal cancer. But, slowly and steadily, the disease had spread through the trunk of the Empire, and had attacked its most vital organs one after the other, fostered on its deadly errand by wealth, peace, art, literature, culture, religion, all the blessings which men most long for and most prize.