There is no doubt that, considered from the point of view of our ancient history, this idea of progress, interpreted American-fashion, is a kind of revolutionary dissolving force. Perhaps the upheaval which it has produced and is producing in Europe can almost be compared with that which Christianity caused in the ancient civilisation, when it destroyed in the Greco-Latin world the political and military spirit which had been the mainstay of that world. Indeed, we must not forget that from the dawn of history up to the French Revolution succeeding generations had lived in Europe contented with little, faithful to traditions, and holding every innovation to be a danger and every enterprise a revolt against God and against the memory of their ancestors. It is true that even in those days men usually preferred ease to poverty and were not insensible to the magnetism of gold. Even then, each succeeding generation saw an increase in the wealth of the world and in the spread of population over the face of the earth. But how slow and spasmodic was the increase! Up to the time of the French Revolution it is impossible to discern in history any differences in wealth and population at intervals of less than a century. The change produced by each generation was so small as to be barely recognisable. In compensation, the men of that time strove to make the world fairer and better. Art and religion were their absorbing preoccupation. From Greece [says one of the characters in my dialogue], which taught the world to write and to sculp, up to the Middle Ages which built the fairest cathedrals and the most fantastic palaces of all times; from the Egypt of the Ptolemies, from which the last rays of Hellenic beauty illumined the Mediterranean world, up to the Rome of the popes and up to the Venice of the sixteenth century, which flaunted her marble pomp in the eyes of the world, up to the France of the eighteenth century, which immortalised her three sovereigns in three world-compelling decorative styles; from Augustus, who protected Horace and Virgil, up to Louis XIV, who protected Racine and Molière, and up to the Marquise de Pompadour, who strove to make Paris the metropolis of elegance,—was not the perpetuation of a form of beauty the supreme ambition of every nation and of every state? Consider the countless efforts made to establish in the world the reign either of sanctity or of justice or both, from the Roman Empire which created law, up to Christianity which strove to cleanse human nature of sin, and up to the French Revolution, which proclaimed to the world the age of liberty, fraternity, and equality.