gy.
It was not long before these ultimate remainders vanished under the
alluvial overflow of the middle classes, swollen by the big economic
gains of the first century. In this respect, the first and second
centuries of the Christian era resemble our own time. In the whole
Empire, alike in Rome, in Gaul, in Asia, there were old aristocratic
families, rich and illustrious, but they were not the class of
greatest power. Under them stood a middle class of merchants,
land-owners, orators, jurists, professors, and other intellectual men,
and this was so numerous, comfortable, and so potent as to cause all
the great social forces, from government to industry, to abandon
the old aristocracy and court it like a new mistress. Art, industry,
literature, were vulgarised in those two centuries, as to-day in
Europe and America, because they had to work mainly for this middle
class which was much more numerous, and yet cruder than the ancient
_elites_. It was the first era of the _cheap_, of vulgarisations, I
was about to say of the _made in Germany_, that enters into
history. There was invented the art of silver-plating, to give the
_bourgeoisie_ at moderate prices the sweet illusion of possessing
objects of silver; great thinkers disappeared; instead were multiplied
manuals, treatises, encyclopaedias, professors that summarised and
vulgarised. Philosophy gradually gave out, like all the higher forms
of literature, and there began the reign of the declaimers and the
sophists; that is, the lecture-givers, the lawyers, the journalists.
In painting and sculpture, original schools were no more to be found,
nor great names, but the number of statues and bas-reliefs increased
infinitely. The paintings of Pompeii and many statues and marbles
that are now admired in European museums are examples of this
industrialised art, inexpensive, creating nothing original, but
furnishing to families in comfortable circumstances passable copies of
works of art--once a privilege only of kings.

The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second century
was another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes. In the
second century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, which
have a certain resemblance to modern ones. There increased solicitude
for the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmented
the number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicity
by administrative means. The movement was support