Moral responsibility, interpreted in Egypt, by the duty which the lawgiver imposed upon fathers and mothers of providing for their illegitimate children, and by their custom of passing judgment on the dead, had fashioned that granite people which will continue to be the wonder and admiration of all ages. So long as Greece and Rome preserved this Egyptian policy, whose light had been introduced among them by severe lawgivers, they were in a position to defy, in like manner, all external enemies; but, from the time that the absolutism of profligacy _towards their slaves_ had hurried them along the downward path to ruin, they refused to submit to those wise laws, which had constituted their strength, and ensured a hopeful future. What vigour, what energy, did this unceasing control bestow upon the administrator! Despite the depravity which found its way into Greece, in the age of Pericles, still what a noble spectacle there is in the struggles of Æschines and of Demosthenes—in that immortal discourse upon the crown in which we perceive the heart of a free people throb in the reciprocal responsibility of the public man and his accusers! It is, on the other hand, sad to consider the work of absolutism, not so much in the pyramids formed out of human carcases by the Genghis Khans and the Tamerlanes, as in the civilized systems, polished like the Roman Empire, that of the Low Countries and of France, in which are observed the highest development of material and intellectual progress side by side with moral decline. Certes, reformers, moralists and satirists, were not wanting in the Roman empire. Honest men, saddened and indignant at the depravity of their age, tried to stem the muddy torrent which was hurrying it in the direction of degrading gratifications. What noble efforts we see, whether among the Catos, the Tacituses, and the Juvenals; or among the Origens, the Tertullians, and the Justins! What moral energy among the Stoics, who took for their maxim _endurance_ and _self-denial_! What grandeur of soul among those obscure Christians, whose performance of the moral obligations which are based upon respect for the dignity of humanity, caused spiritual development to be carried to such a high degree! Did not this reformation, seated upon the throne itself, produce the admirable epoch of the Antonines![32]