he present
century, and these are some of the outcomes of an advanced, and still
rapidly advancing, civilization. These, too, seem to be the invariable
accompaniments of such an advance. A very similar picture of Rome in the
days of Cicero and Caesar is drawn by Mr. Froude in his _Caesar_. He
says: "With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age
stands before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the
more distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of
our own, the blossoming period of the old civilization. It was an age of
material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and
intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of
dinner parties, of sensational majorities and electoral corruption. The
rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest,
except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes
was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment.
Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of
the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would
overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things, which
alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of
personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their
hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing
splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men
spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their
opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any
serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond the circle of the
silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual atmosphere was
saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an
affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and
flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The
truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their
real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and
the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural
forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved."

Next I am going, as I promised, to consider those indulgences which
become luxuries by excessive use, and in this I shall be led also to
consider the effects of luxury. It has become a