sts,
the colonies, the literature, the art, the science, the money capital,
and the spirit--cosmopolitan, expansive, dynamic--of its history.
It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the
world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national,
and historic, by which it created the encyclopaedia and made the
Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire,
wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the
marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation
are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracy
and democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality,
money and science, war and fashion, art and religion. If France
had not had its great history, Champagne would have remained an
effervescing wine of modest household use that the peasants place
every year in barrels for their own family consumption or to sell in
the vicinity of the city of Rheims.

Social Development of the Roman Empire.

Augustus died the twenty-third of August of the year 14 A.D., saying
to Livia, as she embraced him: "Adieu, Livia, remember our long life."
Suetonius adds that, before dying, he had asked the friends who
had come to salute him, if he seemed to them "_mimum vitae commode
transegisse"_--to have acted well his life's comedy. In this famous
phrase many historians have seen a confession, an acknowledgment of
the long role of deceit that the unsurpassable actor had played to
his public. What a mistake! If Augustus did pronounce that famous
sentence, he meant to say quite another thing. An erudite German has
demonstrated with the help of many texts that the ancient writers,
and especially the stoic philosophers, commonly compared life to a
theatrical representation, divided into different acts and with an
inevitable epilogue, death, without intending to say that it was a
thing little serious or not true. They only meant that life is an
action, which has a natural sequence from beginning to end, like a
theatrical representation. There is then no need to translate the
expression of Augustus "the play"--that is, the deceit--"is ended,"
but rather "the drama"--the work committed by destiny--"is finished."

The drama was ended, and what a drama! It is difficult to find in
history a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustus
for nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome,
full of