Between these two extremes of exaggeration, inspired by a self-interest easy to discover, is there not a true middle way that we can deduce from the study of Roman history and from the observation of contemporary life?

In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress as corruption, there was a basis of truth, just as there is a principle of error in the too serene optimism with which we consider corruption as progress.  This force that pushes the new generations on to the future, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy is specially felt in ages like Caesar’s in ancient Rome and ours in the modern world, in which facility in the accumulation of wealth over-excites desires and ambitions in all classes.  They are the times in which personal egoism—­what to-day we call individualism—­usurps a place above all that represents in society the interest of the species:  national duty, the self-abnegation of each for the sake of the common good.  Then these vices and defects become always more common:  intellectual agitation, the weakening of the spirit of tradition, the general relaxation of discipline, the loss of authority, ethical confusion and disorder.  At the same time that certain moral sentiments refine themselves, certain individualisms grow fiercer.  The government may no longer represent the ideas, the aspirations, the energetic will of a small oligarchy; it must make itself more yielding and gracious at the same time that it is becoming more contradictory and discordant.  Family discipline is relaxed; the new generations shake off early the influence of the past; the sentiment of honour and the rigour of moral, religious, and political principles are weakened by a spirit of utility and expediency by which, more or less openly, confessing it or dissimulating, men always seek to do, not that which is right and decorous, but that which is utilitarian.  The civic spirit tends to die out; the number of persons capable of suffering, or even of working, disinterestedly for the common good, for the future, diminishes; children are not wanted; men prefer to live in accord with those in power, ignoring their vices, rather than openly opposing them.  Public events do not interest unless they include a personal advantage.

This is the state of mind that is now diffusing itself throughout Europe; the same state of mind that, with the documents at hand, I have found in the age of Caesar and Augustus, and seen progressively diffusing itself throughout ancient Italy.  The likeness is so great that we re-find in those far-away times, especially in the upper classes, exactly that restless condition that we define by the word “nervousness.”  Horace speaks of this state of mind, which we consider peculiar to ourselves, and describes it, by felicitous image, as strenua inertia—­strenuous inertia,—­agitation vain and ineffective, always wanting something new, but not really knowing what, desiring most ardently yet speedily tiring of