as will be future generations, and as past ages were. Moreover, to
understand at bottom this phenomenon, which appears to me to be the
soul of all history, it is well to add this consideration: It is
evident that there is a capital difference between our judgment of
this phenomenon and that of the ancients; to them it was a malevolent
force of dissolution to which should be attributed all in Roman
history that was sinister and dreadful, a sure sign of incurable
decay; that is why they called it "corruption of customs," and so
lamented it. To-day, on the contrary, it appears to us a universal
beneficent process of transformation; so true is this that we call
"progress" many facts which the ancients attributed to "corruption."
It were useless to expand too much in examples; enough to cite a few.
In the third ode of the first book, in which he so tenderly salutes
the departing Virgil, Horace covers with invective, as an evil-doer
and the corrupter of the human race, that impious being who invented
the ship, which causes man, created for the land, to walk across
waters. Who would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against the
bold builders who construct the magnificent trans-Atlantic liners on
which, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in Boston or New York?
"Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia," exclaims Horace--that is to say, in
anticipation he considered the Wright brothers crazy.

Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuary
laws? We should laugh them all down with one Homeric guffaw, if to-day
it entered somebody's head to propose a law that forbade fair ladies
to spend more than a certain sum on their clothes, or numbered the
hats they might wear; or that regulated dinners of ceremony, fixing
the number of courses, the variety of wines, and the total expense; or
that prohibited labouring men and women from wearing certain stuffs
or certain objects that were wont to be found only upon the persons