North American Union, the Eastern States and
New England, are even more sterile than France. However, no one of
these nations suffers to-day from the small increase of population;
there are yet so many poor and fecund peoples that they can easily
fill the gaps. In the ancient world this was not the case; population
was always and everywhere so scanty that if for some reason it
diminished but slightly, the states could not get on, finding
themselves at the mercy of what they called a "famine of men," a
malady more serious and troublesome than over-population. In the Roman
Empire the Occidental provinces finally fell into the hands of the
barbarians, chiefly because the Graeco-Latin civilisation sterilised
the family, reducing the population incurably. No wonder that the
ancients applied the term "corruption" to a momentum of desires which,
although increasing culture and the refinements of living, easily
menaced the sources of the nation's physical existence.

There is, then, a more general conclusion to draw from this
experience. It is not by chance, nor the unaccountable caprice of
a few ancient writers, that we possess so many small facts on the
development of luxury and the transformation of customs in ancient
Rome; that, for example, among the records of great wars, of
diplomatic missions, of catastrophes political and economic, we find
given the date when the art of fattening fowls was imported into
Italy. The little facts are not so unworthy of the majesty of Roman
history as one at first might think. Everything is bound together in
the life of a nation, and nothing without importance; the humblest
acts, most personal and deepest hidden in the _penetralia_ of the
home, that no one sees, none knows, have an effect, immediate or
remote, on the common life of the nation. There is, between these
small, insignificant facts and the wars, the revolutions, the
tremendous political and social events that bewilder men, a tie, often
invisible to most people, yet nevertheless indestructible.

Nothing in the world is without import: what women spend for
their toilet, the resistance that men make from day to day to the
temptations of the commonest pleasures, the new and petty needs
that insinuate themselves unconsciously into the habits of all; the
reading, the conversations, the impressions, even the most fugacious
that pass in our spirit--all these things, little and innumerable,
that no historian registers, have contribute