But if we are more courageous and more humane, we are, on the other hand, in no way more sober or more temperate. As far as these virtues are concerned, the ancient world cuts a much better figure in history than does the modern. We have deteriorated. The modern world eats and drinks to excess. It indulges to excess in alcoholic drinks and stimulants. The only intoxicating drinks known to the ancients were wine and beer, and wine they always drank mixed with water. They did not know alcohol, nor consequently, liqueurs, now so numerous and so highly appreciated; they did not know tea, coffee, or tobacco. We can assert positively that drunkenness was the rarest of vices in the ancient world, while frugality was the commonest of virtues. We need not take too seriously those orgies of the wealthy to which ancient writers—especially Latin writers—so often allude, or the banquets at which dishes of parrots’ tongues were served, or pearls dissolved in vinegar were drunk. These stories bear a strong family likeness to the legends current in Europe about “the corrupt state of American society,” and are due to the same tendency. They are the exaggerated and violent reaction of an ancient puritanism against the natural advances of luxury and against that kind of moral slackening which always accompanies the increase of wealth. Just as the dispassionate and unprejudiced European, when he examines at close-quarters the so-called “corrupt state of American society,” readily recognises that the high-sounding expression only indicates certain defects and weaknesses which certainly are reprehensible, but which are common to the whole of modern civilisation and not peculiar to America, so the famous Roman orgies and the banquets, which have made so much stir, would seem to us, if a miracle allowed us to attend them, very modest and unassuming affairs compared to our ostentatious displays.