And now let us search our own consciences. Can we honestly declare that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display, this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. Whoever casts his eyes around him, in America as well as in Europe, sees this impression gaining ground on all sides and acquiring force. It fouls the stream of politics, religion, literature, philosophy and art. It corrupts or transforms the spirit of the upper as well as of the lower classes. Not only that, but there is a prevailing tendency to consider this impression a sign of force, a proof of greatness and of progress. The history of Rome admonishes us, then, to distrust this illusion, and to sound the spirit of our civilisation to its deepest depths—that spirit which to us seems a limpid mirror of perfection, while it is really very much the opposite. If, after twenty centuries of work and study, we find ourselves, fortunate heirs of an ancient civilisation, in a position to live more safely and more comfortably than did our ancestors on this little globe, we are not, therefore, justified in altering the moral values and virtues to suit our pleasures. The vices, the faults, the depraved inclinations of twenty centuries ago remain the same to-day and modern civilisation would be guilty of the gravest of errors if, deaf to the great lesson preached by the ruins of Rome, she boasted of those very defects which destroyed in the ancient world one of the greatest works of human brain and energy that history has to offer. V UPS AND DOWNS We are always talking about progress. But does “progress” mean only the multiplication of wealth and of the power and speed of machines, in other words, of our mastery over nature? This would be a rash assertion. “Progress” implies further improvement of, and increase in, the virtues, and the diminution of the vices inherent in human nature. Now, can anyone who knows the history of ancient civilisation, the life, the customs, the ideas, and the moral outlook of the Greeks and Romans, say that we have become better than they? And if he can say so, how much better have we become? Have we become better in every department of life, or are there some things in which we show a falling-off?