These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization offers the spectacle of a fine social animality. Emulation with them aimed at likeness, just as, with us, it aims at unlikeness. Once they possessed five or six poets--successful off-shoots of Hellenic grafting--they refused to admit any others, and it is quite possible that, their social, racial instinct dominating the instinct of freedom and individuality, no poet of fresh inspiration was born to them for four or five centuries. They had the emperor and they had Virgil, and they obeyed both equally until the Christian revolt and the barbarian invasion joined hands above the Capitol. Literary liberty, like all other liberties, is born of the union of consciousness and strength. The day when Saint Ambrose, writing his hymns, disregarded the Horatian principles should be memorable, for it marks unmistakably the birth of a new mentality. Just as the political history of the Romans has furnished us with the conception of historical decadence, so the history of their literature has furnished us with the conception of literary decadence--the two faces of a single idea; for it has been easy to indicate the coincidence of the two movements, and to inculcate the belief that there was a necessary connection between the two. Montesquieu owes his fame to the fact that he was particularly the dupe of this illusion. Savages find it very difficult to admit the possibility of natural death. For them, every death is a murder. They have not the slightest sense of law; they live in the domain of the accidental. It has been agreed to call this state of mind inferior, and it is inferior, though the notion of rigid law is just as false and as dangerous as its negation. The only absolutely necessary laws are natural laws, which can neither vary nor change. In the case of social and political evolution, not only are there no necessary laws, but there are no very general laws even. Either these so-called laws, confused with the facts which they explain, amount to nothing but wise and honourable assertions, or else they declare, though over-emphatically, the very principle of change. Empires, then, are born, grow and die. Social combinations are unstable. Human groups have, at different epochs, different powers of cohesion. New affinities appear and are propagated. Here there would be the material for a treatise on social mechanics, if the writer did not insist too rigorously on squaring his philosophy with the reality of unexpected catastrophes. For the unexpected must be left a place which is sometimes the throne whence irony flashes and laughs. The idea of decadence is, then, merely the idea of natural death. Historians admit no other. To explain the taking of Byzantium by the Turks, they make us listen to the murmur of theological quarrels, and the crack of the Blue's whip in the circus. Longchamps