contemporary life?

In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress as
corruption, there was a basis of truth, just as there is a principle
of error in the too serene optimism with which we consider corruption
as progress. This force that pushes the new generations on to the
future, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy is
specially felt in ages like Cæsar's in ancient Rome and ours in
the modern world, in which facility in the accumulation of wealth
over-excites desires and ambitions in all classes. They are the times
in which personal egoism--what to-day we call individualism--usurps
a place above all that represents in society the interest of the
species: national duty, the self-abnegation of each for the sake
of the common good. Then these vices and defects become always
more common: intellectual agitation, the weakening of the spirit
of tradition, the general relaxation of discipline, the loss of
authority, ethical confusion and disorder. At the same time that
certain moral sentiments refine themselves, certain individualisms
grow fiercer. The government may no longer represent the ideas, the
aspirations, the energetic will of a small oligarchy; it must make
itself more yielding and gracious at the same time that it is becoming
more contradictory and discordant. Family discipline is relaxed;
the new generations shake off early the influence of the past; the
sentiment of honour and the rigour of moral, religious, and political
principles are weakened by a spirit of utility and expediency by
which, more or less openly, confessing it or dissimulating, men always
seek to do, not that which is right and decorous, but that which is
utilitarian. The civic spirit tends to die out; the number of persons
capable of suffering, or even of working, disinterestedly for the
common good, for the future, diminishes; children are not wanted; men