England, are even more sterile than France.  However, no one of these nations suffers to-day from the small increase of population; there are yet so many poor and fecund peoples that they can easily fill the gaps.  In the ancient world this was not the case; population was always and everywhere so scanty that if for some reason it diminished but slightly, the states could not get on, finding themselves at the mercy of what they called a “famine of men,” a malady more serious and troublesome than over-population.  In the Roman Empire the Occidental provinces finally fell into the hands of the barbarians, chiefly because the Graeco-Latin civilisation sterilised the family, reducing the population incurably.  No wonder that the ancients applied the term “corruption” to a momentum of desires which, although increasing culture and the refinements of living, easily menaced the sources of the nation’s physical existence.

There is, then, a more general conclusion to draw from this experience.  It is not by chance, nor the unaccountable caprice of a few ancient writers, that we possess so many small facts on the development of luxury and the transformation of customs in ancient Rome; that, for example, among the records of great wars, of diplomatic missions, of catastrophes political and economic, we find given the date when the art of fattening fowls was imported into Italy.  The little facts are not so unworthy of the majesty of Roman history as one at first might think.  Everything is bound together in the life of a nation, and nothing without importance; the humblest acts, most personal and deepest hidden in the penetralia of the home, that no one sees, none knows, have an effect, immediate or remote, on the common life of the nation.  There is, between these small, insignificant facts and the wars, the revolutions, the tremendous political and social events that bewilder men, a tie, often invisible to most people, yet nevertheless indestructible.

Nothing in the world is without import:  what women spend for their toilet, the resistance that men make from day to day to the temptations of the commonest pleasures, the new and petty needs that insinuate themselves unconsciously into the habits of all; the reading, the conversations, the impressions, even the most fugacious that pass in our spirit—­all these things, little and innumerable, that no historian registers, have contributed to produce this revolution, that war, this catastrophe, that political overturn, which men wonder at and study as a prodigy.

The causes of how many apparently mysterious historical events would be more clearly and profoundly known, of how many periods would the spirit be better understood, did we only possess the private records of the families that make up the ruling classes!  Every deed we do in the intimacy of the home reacts on the whole of our environment.  With our every act we assume a responsibility toward the nation and posterity,