I heartily concur in this opinion. Modern civilisation will resist the ills which assail it better than ancient civilisation resisted them. But it will be able to do so because it is stronger, not because it does not contain within itself the germ of the cancer which destroyed the Roman world. Many symptoms prove this. I will dilate upon one of them only, the most serious, the most salient, the most generally recognised and felt, even though few up to the present have seen in it an analogy and a resemblance to the great historical crisis of the fall of the Roman Empire. I refer to the rise in the cost of living. To-day, Europe and America resound from one end to another with a chorus of complaints from men and women who have to live in the cities. Rent, bread, milk, meat, vegetables, eggs, clothes—everything, in short, is rising in price. Even people in the thirties can remember having witnessed times of fable, a kind of mythical golden age, in which things were worth practically nothing compared with their price to-day. Governments are besieged with entreaties, threats, and prayers to provide supplies, but they do not know how to do so. What is the cause, what the remedy, of this strange phenomenon? Some lay the blame on the taxes; some on Protection; some on the merchants and speculators. And indeed, at first sight, the phenomenon seems inexplicable. At no period of history was there such a determined rush to make money as at the present time. No age had at its disposal so many and such effective means of making it. The men of to-day are obsessed to such an extent by the frenzy for work that they no longer have time to live. Statistics tell us in exact figures the yearly increase in the production of the world. So the earth ought to be wallowing in abundance, an abundance such as the world has never seen heretofore. How comes it, then, that men everywhere complain, and most loudly in the richest countries, of the intolerable dearness of everything? What is the object, what the effect, of the work of the man of to-day, if not abundance but scarcity is the recompense of daily toil?