In this day, in everything appertaining to municipal government, the greater is sacrificed to the lesser; the smug, the ordinary, the expedient, the venal are first of all considered; the kind of man who pushes to the front in affairs is bustling, sharp, keen, insensible, in whose own existence no necessity for anything except vulgar prosperity, as ugly as you will, is felt for an hour. To speak to such men of such impersonal desires as moved the makers of the great cities of old, is to speak in an unknown tongue, which they appraise as gibberish. They are, for the present time, the rulers of the world, and the material they are made of is the same clay, whether its shape take that of an emperor or a contractor, of a king or a beadle, of a minister or a vestryman. At the present hour the earth is given over to them. Wyzewa accepts this insatiable mania for destruction as a characteristic, which of course it undoubtedly is, of the general disease of modernity; but he does not seem to trace it to what is surely its source, the greed of gain. All these engineers, builders, contractors, town councillors, bankers, usurers, speculators, chairmen, shareholders, and directors of companies, can make nothing out of the ancient glory and grace of beautiful cities; the mayors can get no savoury morsel to compensate them for all their servility and time-serving; the deputies can find no useful plunder to enrich the crew who have voted for them; in respecting the beauty of the past, syndicates and tradesmen and gamblers on 'Change would reap no harvest of gold whatever. What else but greed has been the motive of that shameless desecration of Rome against which Geoffroy has raised his voice from the tomb to protest? What else but greed the motive of that infamous destruction of the entire centre of Florence, its historic towers and churches and palaces, torn down with blind rage to be replaced by hideous hotels, and monster shops, and grotesque monuments? the most piteous, and the most inexcusable, injury ever done to the rights of history and of art. What else the motive of that wanton disfigurement of Venice which has disgraced the last fifteen years of the municipal rule, and is about to continue the work of ruin merely to enrich the men of greed, the English and American tradesmen, the Hebrew speculators, the German hucksters, the cosmopolitan inflators of bubble companies? The motive of all these destructions is always the same, and always of the lowest kind: gain. Everyone concerned in them gains, or hopes to gain. There is no other instinct or idea than this. It is, like the present diplomacy of Europe, an all-round game of grab; and a large percentage of the gains goes to the doctors who label the gambling 'Hygiene.'