ome sank, when not her liberties merely, but
her virtues, were decaying out of her--the sink into which all wicked
States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because
men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and
Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by
_panem et circenses_--bread and games--or, if need be, Pilgrimages; that
the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last.
That, let it ape as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as
another Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead freedom,
really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the
basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money-bag, by the
divine sanction of the bayonet.

That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples
of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it
is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last.
Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last? This
falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's
spear of truth and fact. And--

"Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in
slippery places, and casteth them down. Suddenly do they perish, and
come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt
Thou make their image to vanish out of the city."

Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in
the United States?

And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.

The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of
Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold,
by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the
past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will they revive?
Under the genial influences of free institutions will the good seed which
is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them all
what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in
past years--a joy and an inspiration to all the nations round? Shall it
be thus? God grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only
stand by, watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working
out of a tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of
the whole civilised world.

For if the agonising old nations fail to