for which, then as now, the chief condition was peace. As soon as men
realised that peace gives that greater wealth, those enjoyments more
refined, that higher culture, which for a century they had sought by
war, Italy became quiet; revolutionists became guardians and guards of
order; there gathered about Augustus a coalition of social forces that
tended to impose on the Empire, alike on the parts that wished it and
those that did not, the _Pax Romana_.

Now all this immense story that fills three centuries, that gathers
within itself so many revolutions, so many legislative reforms, so
many great men, so many events, tragic and glorious, this vast history
that for so many centuries holds the interest of all cultured nations,
and that, considered as a whole, seems almost a prodigy, you can, on
the track of the old idea of "corruption," explain in its
profoundest origins by one small fact, universal, common, of the very
simplest--something that every one may observe in the limited circle
of his own personal experience,--by that automatic increase of
ambitions and desires, with every new generation, which prevents the
human world from crystallising in one form, constrains it to continual
changes in material make-up as well as in ideals and moral appearance.
In other words, every new generation must, in order to satisfy that
part of its aspirations which is peculiarly and entirely its own,
alter, whether little or much, in one way or another, the condition
of the world it entered at birth. We can then, in our personal
experiences every day, verify the universal law of history--a law
that can act with greater or less intensity, more or less rapidity,
according to times and places, but that ceases to authenticate itself
at no time and in no place.

The United States is subject to that law to-day, as is old Europe,