And now what does this all mean?  The pessimist will tell us, doubtless, that it is a sign of decadence.  It does remind us a little of the later days of the Roman empire when the peoples of the remotest parts of the known world, with their arts, customs and manners, were all to be found in the imperial city—­when the gods of Greece, Syria and Egypt were worshipped side by side with those of old Rome, where all sorts of exotic art, philosophy, literature and politics took root and flourished.  That is usually regarded as a period of decadence, and it was certainly a precursor of the empire’s fall.  When we consider that it was contemporaneous with great material prosperity and with the spread of luxury and a certain loosening of the moral fiber, such as we are experiencing in America today, we can not help feeling a little perturbed.  Yet there is another way of looking at it.  A period of this sort is often only a period of readjustment.  The Roman empire as a political entity went out of existence long ago, but Rome’s influence on our art, law, literature and government is still powerful.  Her so-called “fall” was really not a fall but a changing into something else.  In fact, if we take Bergson’s view-point—­which it seems to me is undoubtedly the true one, the thing we call Rome was never anything else but a process of change.  At the time of which we speak the visible part of the change was accelerated—­that is all.  In like manner each one of you as an individual is not a fixed entity.  You are changing every instant and the reality about you is the change, not what you see with the eye or photograph with the camera—­that is merely a stage through which you pass and in which you do not stay—­not for the thousand millionth part of the smallest recognizable instant.  So our current American life and thought is not something that stands still long enough for us to describe it.  Even as we write the description it has changed to another phase.  And the phenomena of transition just now are particularly noticeable—­that is all.  We may call them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new and more glorious national life.

“The size and intricacy which we have to deal with,” says Walter Lippmann, “have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations of our ancestors.”

This is quite true, and so, in place of simplicity we are introducing complexity, very largely by selection and combination of simple elements evolved in former times to fit earlier conditions.  Whether organic relations can be established among these elements, so that there shall one day issue from the welter something well-rounded, something American, fitting American conditions and leading American aspirations forward and upward, is yet on the knees of the gods.  We, the men and women of America, and may I not say, we, the Librarians of America, can do much to direct the issue.

DRUGS AND THE MAN[14]