impressive to us where it least immediately instructs.

With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands
before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the more
distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our
own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect was
trained to the highest point which it could reach, and on the great
subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art,
even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men thought
as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue, aspired and
struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material progress and
material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture;
an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner-parties, of
senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The highest offices of
state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they were confined, in
fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most ready use of the
tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had been exchanged for
distinctions of wealth. The struggles between plebeians and patricians for
equality of privilege were over, and a new division had been formed
between the party of property and a party who desired a change in the
structure of society. The free cultivators were disappearing from the
soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast estates, held by a few favored
families and cultivated by slaves, while the old agricultural population
was driven off the land, and was crowded into towns. The rich were
extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for
its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain
money without labor, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriotism
survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendency of the party
which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it
for a more equal distribution of the good things which alone were valued.