national menace.

 There is a national menace. In these modern days one finds oneself rummaging the pages of Gibbon and Tacitus and Juvenal. Look at those old empires which lived by bread alone; by riches so enormous that it seems as if God had determined to give money a chance to do its best; living by power so vast that there were no more worlds to conquer; living by pleasure so prodigal and so refined and varied that the liveliest invention was exhausted, and the keenest appetite surfeited. Babylon, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage,—to-day we dare not open to our children the records of the inner life of these communities. We almost hesitate to read its fearful summary in the first chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The old empires have gone down in ruin, and their pleasures have turned to a corruption which is an offence in the world’s nostrils. The old city which rang with the cry of “Bread and the Circus!” is only a monument now. The tourist wanders over the Palatine, and peers down into the choked vaults of the Cæsars’ palaces; and the antiquarian rummages where Nero’s fish-ponds gleamed, and climbs along the broken tiers of the Coliseum, from which the culture and beauty and fashion of Rome looked down with delight upon Christian martyrs in the fangs of tigers.Not in material progress then, nor in art and science, nor in the stoicism of absolute duty, is the law of human nature found to lie. We fall back upon the immemorial truth—“Man shall not live by bread alone.” Ruskin