of Champagne is rooted, not only in the ground where the grapes are cultivated, and preserved in the vast cellars where the precious crops are stored, but in all the historic tradition of France, in all that which has given France worldly glory and power:  the victorious wars, the distant conquests, the colonies, the literature, the art, the science, the money capital, and the spirit—­cosmopolitan, expansive, dynamic—­of its history.  It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopaedia and made the Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium:  aristocracy and democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality, money and science, war and fashion, art and religion.  If France had not had its great history, Champagne would have remained an effervescing wine of modest household use that the peasants place every year in barrels for their own family consumption or to sell in the vicinity of the city of Rheims.

Social Development of the Roman Empire.

Augustus died the twenty-third of August of the year 14 A.D., saying to Livia, as she embraced him:  “Adieu, Livia, remember our long life.”  Suetonius adds that, before dying, he had asked the friends who had come to salute him, if he seemed to them “mimum vitae commode transegisse"—­to have acted well his life’s comedy.  In this famous phrase many historians have seen a confession, an acknowledgment of the long role of deceit that the unsurpassable actor had played to his public.  What a mistake!  If Augustus did pronounce that famous sentence, he meant to say quite another thing.  An erudite German has demonstrated with the help of many texts that the ancient writers, and especially the stoic philosophers, commonly compared life to a theatrical representation, divided into different acts and with an inevitable epilogue, death, without intending to say that it was a thing little serious or not true.  They only meant that life is an action, which has a natural sequence from beginning to end, like a theatrical representation.  There is then no need to translate the expression of Augustus “the play”—­that is, the deceit—­“is ended,” but rather “the drama”—­the work committed by destiny—­“is finished.”

The drama was ended, and what a drama!  It is difficult to find in history a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustus for nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome, full of ambition and daring, he had come to Rome, throwing himself head first into the frightful turmoil let loose by the murder of Caesar, to that tranquil death, the death of a great wise man, in the midst of the pax Romana, now spread from end to end of the Empire!  After so many tragic catastrophies had struck his class and his family, Euthanasia—­the death of the happy—­descended for the first time since the passing of Lucullus, to close the eyes of a great Roman.