traversing what may properly be called the
BARBAROUS epoch of our history,--the epoch at which the predominant
intellectual activity is employed in achievements which are mainly of a
material character. Military barbarism, or the inability of communities
to live together without frequent warfare, has been nearly outgrown
by the whole Western world. Private wars, long since made everywhere
illegal, have nearly ceased; and public wars, once continual, have
become infrequent. But industrial barbarism, by which I mean the
inability of a community to direct a portion of its time to purposes of
spiritual life, after providing for its physical maintenance,--this
kind of barbarism the modern world has by no means outgrown. To-day, the
great work of life is to live; while the amount of labour consumed
in living has throughout the present century been rapidly increasing.
Nearly the whole of this American community toils from youth to old
age in merely procuring the means for satisfying the transient wants of
life. Our time and energies, our spirit and buoyancy, are quite used up
in what is called "getting on."

Another point of difference between the structure of American and of
Athenian society must not be left out of the account. The time has gone
by in which the energies of a hundred thousand men and women could be
employed in ministering to the individual perfection of twenty-five
thousand. Slavery, in the antique sense,--an absolute command of brain
as well as of muscle, a slave-system of skilled labour,--we have never
had. In our day it is for each man to earn his own bread; so that the
struggle for existence has become universal. The work of one class does
not furnish leisure for another class. The exceptional circumstances
which freed the Athenian from industrial barbarism, and enabled him to
become the great teacher and model of culture for the human race, have
disappeared forever.

Then the general standard of comfortable living, as already hinted, has
been greatly raised, and is still rising. What would have satisfied the
ancient would seem to us like penury. We have a domestic life of which
the Greek knew nothing. We live during a large part of the year in the
house. Our social life goes on under the roof. Our houses are not mere
places for eating and sleeping, like the houses of the ancients. It
therefore costs us a large amount of toil to get what is called shelter
for our heads. The sum which a young married man,