ul experiment, according
to his opponents), gratuitous and compulsory primary education, the
improvement of the night schools, and popular classes for adults. He
was to a large extent successful in all these, except in the direction
of compulsory education. The efforts which he made to improve the
instruction given to young girls brought upon him the tempest. The
bishops, with Monsignor Dupanloup of Orleans at their head, raised a
veritable crusade, and Pope Pio Nono himself at length entered the
hostile ranks. Probably in part because of this conflict, he was
superseded in 1869 and was made a member of the Senate, from which he
retired to private life, and the prosecution of his literary labors on
the fall of the empire, in the following year. He died in 1894.

As an author his style is clear and direct. Among his numerous works
the most important are the two great histories, for which, as for
other achievements, honors were heaped upon him. In these he laid
particular stress upon the _milieu_--the conditions of place, time,
and race. Consequently he has therein written the history of the Greek
and Roman peoples, and not merely the history of Greece and Rome,--and
has pictured them, so far as possible, as they looked and felt and
thought and acted. He exhibits, for example, the growth of the
magnificent power of Rome, and its decadence; and shows the
all-conquering empire subdued to the manners, the gods, and the
institutions of the conquered. And worse:--"They had become enamored
of the arts, the letters, and the philosophy of Greece, and dying
Greece had avenged itself by transmitting to them the corruption which
had dishonored its old age."

The drift of his argument appears in this paragraph, in which he sums
up his story of the Eternal City:--"In the earlier portion of its
history may be seen the happy effects of a progressively liberal
policy; in the later the baneful consequences of absolute power,
governing a servile society through a venal administration."

THE NATIONAL POLICY

From the 'History of Rome'

The Roman power, till then confined to the West, was now to penetrate
into another universe,--that of the successors of Alexander. The
eternal glory of Rome, the immense benefaction by which she effaces
the memory of so many unjust wars, is to have reunited those two
worlds that in all former ages were divided in interest, and strangers
to each other; is to have mingled and fused the brilliant but