Why, then, did the ancient writers bewail luxury, inclination to pleasure, prodigality—­things all comprised in the notorious “corruption”—­in so much the livelier fashion than do moderns, although they lived in a world which, being poorer and more simple, could amuse itself, make display, and indulge in dissipation so much less than we do?  This is one of the chief questions of Roman history, and I flatter myself not to have entirely wasted work in writing my book [1] above all, because I hope to have contributed a little, if not actually to solve this question, at least to illuminate it; because in so doing I believe I have found a kind of key that opens at the same time many mysteries in Roman history and in contemporary life.  The ancient writers and moralists wrote so much of Roman corruption, because—­nearer in this, as in so many other things, to the vivid actuality—­they understood that wars, revolutions, the great spectacular events that are accomplished in sight of the world, do not form all the life of peoples; that these occurrences, on the contrary, are but the ultimate, exterior explanation, the external irradiation, or the final explosion of an internal force that is acting constantly in the family, in private habit, in the moral and intellectual disposition of the individual.  They understood that all the changes, internal and external, in a nation, are bound together and in part depend on one very common fact, which is everlasting and universal, and which everybody may observe if he will but look about him—­on the increase of wants, the enlargement of ideas, the shifting of habits, the advance of luxury, the increase of expense that is caused by every generation.

[Footnote 1:  The Greatness and Decline of Rome. 5 vols.  New York and London.];

Look around you to-day:  in every family you may easily observe the same phenomenon.  A man has been born in a certain social condition and has succeeded during his youth and vigour in adding to his original fortune.  Little by little as he was growing rich, his needs and his luxuries increased.  When a certain point was reached, he stopped.  The men are few who can indefinitely augment their particular wants, or keep changing their habits throughout their lives, even after the disappearance of vigour and virile elasticity.  The increase of wants and of luxury, the change of habits, continues, instead, in the new generation, in the children, who began to live in the ease which their fathers won after long effort and fatigue, and in maturer age; who, in short, started where the previous generation left off, and therefore wish to gain yet new enjoyments, different from and greater than those that they obtained without trouble through the efforts of the preceding generation.  It is this little common drama, which we see re-enacted in every family and in which every one of us has been and will be an actor—­to-day as a young radical who innovates customs, to-morrow as an old