reason to believe that they were the most profoundly
cultivated of all peoples; that a larger proportion of men lived
complete, well-rounded, harmonious lives in ancient Athens than in
any other known community. Keen, nimble-minded, and self-possessed;
audacious speculators, but temperate and averse to extravagance;
emotionally healthy, and endowed with an unequalled sense of beauty and
propriety; how admirable and wonderful they seem when looked at across
the gulf of ages intervening,--and what a priceless possession to
humanity, of what noble augury for the distant future, is the fact that
such a society has once existed!

The lesson to be drawn from the study of this antique life will impress
itself more deeply upon us after we have briefly contemplated the
striking contrast to it which is afforded by the phase of civilization
amid which we live to-day. Ever since Greek civilization was merged
in Roman imperialism, there has been a slowly growing tendency toward
complexity of social life,--toward the widening of sympathies, the
multiplying of interests, the increase of the number of things to
be done. Through the later Middle Ages, after Roman civilization had
absorbed and disciplined the incoming barbarism which had threatened to
destroy it, there was a steadily increasing complication of society, a
multiplication of the wants of life, and a consequent enhancement of the
difficulty of self-maintenance. The ultimate causes of this phenomenon
lie so far beneath the surface that they could be satisfactorily
discussed only in a technical essay on the evolution of society. It will
be enough for us here to observe that the great geographical discoveries
of the sixteenth century and the somewhat later achievements of physical
science have, during the past two hundred years, aided powerfully
in determining the entrance of the Western world upon an industrial
epoch,--an epoch which has for its final object the complete subjection
of the powers of nature to purposes of individual comfort and happiness.
We have now to trace some of the effects of this lately-begun industrial
development upon social life and individual culture. And as we studied
the leisureliness of antiquity where its effects were most conspicuous,
in the city of Athens, we shall now do well to study the opposite
characteristics of modern society where they are most conspicuously
exemplified, in our own country. The attributes of American life which
it will be