less than we do? This is one of the chief questions of Roman history,
and I flatter myself not to have entirely wasted work in writing my
book [1] above all, because I hope to have contributed a little,
if not actually to solve this question, at least to illuminate it;
because in so doing I believe I have found a kind of key that opens
at the same time many mysteries in Roman history and in contemporary
life. The ancient writers and moralists wrote so much of Roman
corruption, because--nearer in this, as in so many other things, to
the vivid actuality--they understood that wars, revolutions, the great
spectacular events that are accomplished in sight of the world, do not
form all the life of peoples; that these occurrences, on the contrary,
are but the ultimate, exterior explanation, the external irradiation,
or the final explosion of an internal force that is acting constantly
in the family, in private habit, in the moral and intellectual
disposition of the individual. They understood that all the changes,
internal and external, in a nation, are bound together and in part
depend on one very common fact, which is everlasting and universal,
and which everybody may observe if he will but look about him--on the
increase of wants, the enlargement of ideas, the shifting of habits,
the advance of luxury, the increase of expense that is caused by every
generation.

[Footnote 1: _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_. 5 vols. New York and
London.];

Look around you to-day: in every family you may easily observe the
same phenomenon. A man has been born in a certain social condition and
has succeeded during his youth and vigour in adding to his original
fortune. Little by little as he was growing rich, his needs and his
luxuries increased. When a certain point was reached, he stopped. The
men are few who can indefinitely augment their particular wants, or
keep changing their habits throughout their lives, even after the
disappearance of vigour and virile elasticity. The increase of wants
and of luxury, the change of habits, continues, instead, in the new
generation, in the children, who began to live in the ease which their
fathers won after long effort and fatigue, and in maturer age; who, in
short, started where the previous generation left off, and therefore
wish to gain yet new enjoyments, different from and greater than
those that they obtained without trouble through the efforts of the
preceding generation. It is this little