form, constrains it to continual changes in material make-up as well as in ideals and moral appearance.  In other words, every new generation must, in order to satisfy that part of its aspirations which is peculiarly and entirely its own, alter, whether little or much, in one way or another, the condition of the world it entered at birth.  We can then, in our personal experiences every day, verify the universal law of history—­a law that can act with greater or less intensity, more or less rapidity, according to times and places, but that ceases to authenticate itself at no time and in no place.

The United States is subject to that law to-day, as is old Europe, as will be future generations, and as past ages were.  Moreover, to understand at bottom this phenomenon, which appears to me to be the soul of all history, it is well to add this consideration:  It is evident that there is a capital difference between our judgment of this phenomenon and that of the ancients; to them it was a malevolent force of dissolution to which should be attributed all in Roman history that was sinister and dreadful, a sure sign of incurable decay; that is why they called it “corruption of customs,” and so lamented it.  To-day, on the contrary, it appears to us a universal beneficent process of transformation; so true is this that we call “progress” many facts which the ancients attributed to “corruption.”  It were useless to expand too much in examples; enough to cite a few.  In the third ode of the first book, in which he so tenderly salutes the departing Virgil, Horace covers with invective, as an evil-doer and the corrupter of the human race, that impious being who invented the ship, which causes man, created for the land, to walk across waters.  Who would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against the bold builders who construct the magnificent trans-Atlantic liners on which, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in Boston or New York?  “Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia,” exclaims Horace—­that is to say, in anticipation he considered the Wright brothers crazy.

Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuary laws?  We should laugh them all down with one Homeric guffaw, if to-day it entered somebody’s head to propose a law that forbade fair ladies to spend more than a certain sum on their clothes, or numbered the hats they might wear; or that regulated dinners of ceremony, fixing the number of courses, the variety of wines, and the total expense; or that prohibited labouring men and women from wearing certain stuffs or certain objects that were wont to be found only upon the persons of people of wealth and leisure.  And yet laws of this tenor were compiled, published, observed, up to two centuries ago, without any one’s finding it absurd.  The historic force that, as riches increase, impels the new generations to desire new satisfactions, new pleasures, operated then as to-day; only then men were inclined to consider it as a new kind of ominous disease that needed checking.