This is precisely the mistake which modern civilisation must learn to avoid. The catastrophe of the Roman Empire teaches us moderns one lesson: and that is, that the evil from which the great cities of the civil world are suffering at present is a salutary, health-giving, and beneficent visitation. For it puts a natural brake on the growth of cities and of their luxury, and keeps the population in the fields, where the rise in the price of living brings profit, greater comfort, and improved living in its train. It is, in short, the vis medicatrix naturæ, which tends to restore the balance between agriculture and industry, between the city and the country, a balance which the development of modern civilisation has upset. Therefore all the artificial measures which pretend to mitigate this evil, at the very moment when the force of circumstances demands that this development shall stop, must be pernicious. While they tide over a trifling evil of the moment, they lay up for the future troubles and difficulties and dangers of infinitely greater gravity.
Even if modern civilisation adopted in its entirety the policy pursued by the Roman Empire, and tried to eradicate the evil with the same deadly artificial measures which only aggravated it, there would still doubtless be no ground for fearing a catastrophe in the future analogous to that which overwhelmed Greco-Roman civilisation. Modern civilisation is too vast, too powerful, too deep-rooted, to have any fear of a similar fate. But if not destroyed, modern civilisation might be profoundly shaken and weakened in the event of its imitating the policy of Rome and seeking to favour the cities overmuch at the expense of the country;—all the more shaken and weakened, because, dazzled as we all are by the triumphs of the world in which we live, and by the surface marks of its powers and grandeur, it is much more difficult for us than it was for the ancients in a similar case to discern the signs of old age in it, and the cracks which are spreading in the edifice in which we live.
There is a further lesson to be learned by us moderns from the history of the decadence of the Roman Empire: and that is, not to mistake the glamour of the external manifestations of wealth and power for signs of real wealth and power. A civilisation is not always in reality richer and stronger in times when it bears the most visible marks of so being; we are rather apt to find that, when it is most dazzling in outward seeming, its decadence has already begun. We often halt in stupefaction and admiration before the great ruins of ancient Rome, especially those offered by the European provinces of the Empire. We think how great, powerful, and rich must have been the Empire which could rear monuments so massive that all the centuries have not been able to sweep them entirely from the face of the earth. And yet, if we are to look at these relics in their right light, we must remember that practically all the great Roman monuments whose remains survive to our day on a large scale, belong to the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the Christian era—to the centuries of decadence and dissolution. As the Empire weakens and ages, its monuments become more and more elaborate and colossal. A fairly safe rule for guessing the century to which Roman monuments belong is to assume that the more imposing the ruins, the later is the epoch to which they should be attributed.
For Rome herself, the time of the greatest expansion, splendour, and population was the middle of the fourth century—that is to say, when her decadence was already far advanced. Not till then did Rome become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration of the whole world. How much smaller, on the other hand, how much more simple and modest was she in the first century, a time when the Empire really was at its most flourishing epoch, with its frontiers safe, its population on the up-grade, its cities developing themselves by a process of growth which was still a perfectly natural one, agriculture, trade, and industries in a sound condition, and the State well organised and strong.
Nor is this a historical paradox. It is only what always happens to a greater or less extent. In families as in nations and civilisations, ostentation, display, the doing on a grand scale everything, even what might be done on a small scale without detriment, or even advantageously, are a sign of decadence rather than of progress. The passion for the colossal and the enormous is not a healthy passion, nor does it flourish in epochs of strength and sound moral and social equilibrium; it is a passion which thrives in epochs of decadence, epochs convulsed by a deep-seated disproportion between desires and reality, a thirst for excitements and violent sensations, lavish in the expenditure of labour and of wealth to procure a fallacious illusion of grandeur and power, spurred on by a spirit of rivalry and of competition which easily degenerates into false pride.
Not the least of the causes contributing to the maintenance and increase in the ancient cities of that sumptuousness of festivals, ceremonies, and monuments which gradually ruined the Roman Empire was the rivalry between the big, the medium-sized, and the small cities of the Empire, between provinces and districts, between classes, families, professions, sects, and religions. When a city built a theatre, or baths, or a basilica, at once her sister-cities wanted one too, as big or bigger. If a rich family built or endowed a temple or baths, the other families wished to do the same or more. There was a continual competition between the religions to have the finest temple or the most sumptuous ceremonial. That explains why a little city like Verona, for instance, has an enormous amphitheatre, in which the whole population of the city could be accommodated several times over. That explains why the provinces, the cities and private individuals, in this competition of display and magnificence, all showered enormous wealth on that display, wealth which would have been better spent in defending the Empire or in preserving its economic resources. Many of those remains which evoke our admiration to-day meant, in the days when they reared their proud bulk to the sky, the ruin of the Empire!
And now let us search our own consciences. Can we honestly declare that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display, this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. Whoever casts his eyes around him, in America as well as in Europe, sees this impression gaining ground on all sides and acquiring force. It fouls the stream of politics, religion, literature, philosophy and art. It corrupts or transforms the spirit of the upper as well as of the lower classes. Not only that, but there is a prevailing tendency to consider this impression a sign of force, a proof of greatness and of progress. The history of Rome admonishes us, then, to distrust this illusion, and to sound the spirit of our civilisation to its deepest depths—that spirit which to us seems a limpid mirror of perfection, while it is really very much the opposite. If, after twenty centuries of work and study, we find ourselves, fortunate heirs of an ancient civilisation, in a position to live more safely and more comfortably than did our ancestors on this little globe, we are not, therefore, justified in altering the moral values and virtues to suit our pleasures. The vices, the faults, the depraved inclinations of twenty centuries ago remain the same to-day and modern civilisation would be guilty of the gravest of errors if, deaf to the great lesson preached by the ruins of Rome, she boasted of those very defects which destroyed in the ancient world one of the greatest works of human brain and energy that history has to offer.
V
UPS AND DOWNS
We are always talking about progress. But does “progress” mean only the multiplication of wealth and of the power and speed of machines, in other words, of our mastery over nature? This would be a rash assertion. “Progress” implies further improvement of, and increase in, the virtues, and the diminution of the vices inherent in human nature. Now, can anyone who knows the history of ancient civilisation, the life, the customs, the ideas, and the moral outlook of the Greeks and Romans, say that we have become better than they? And if he can say so, how much better have we become? Have we become better in every department of life, or are there some things in which we show a falling-off?