ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN AMERICA.* IN 1906 Signor Ferrero received
an invitation to visit South America, and gladly seized the opportunity of making himself acquainted with a subject which seemed sufficiently remote frem ancient Rome. In Brazil and the Argentine he was .received with that warmth to which his great reputation entitled him, and in this book he has given us a brilliant picture of the effect which the natural luxuriance, the material prosperity, and the abounding vitality of these lands produced upon an impressionable classical scholar. The same _year he was invited by Mr. Roosevelt to the United States, and spent some months lecturing to the Universities and beholding the life of that other America. Signor Ferrero, as his writings bear witness, is very far from the dryasdust student. He sees the life of ancient Rome as a series of coloured panoramas and variegated personalities ; he is an artist, and a philosopher too, for he is quick to discern the spirit of an epoch, and to find affinities in the life of our own times. Hence his American visits set him reflecting on the meaning of these new civilizations, this Americanism which is so pro- foundly affecting Europe. It is the stark opposite of that elder civilization which rules the old world, but that civiliza- tion in turn was once young. Is Americanism so very different from the spirit of his own special period, the time of Rome's greatness and decline ? He asks that question and many others in the interesting essays before us. They form a curious volume, for many pages are occupied with a recital of the _arguments in another work of the author's not yet published in English, Between the Old World and the New, where the _same problem is discussed in a series of Platonic dialogues. Meanwhile, here is Signor Ferrero's view in sober oratio recta. The book is a miscellany, for it contains three chapters which have nothing to do with Americanism, three narratives of famous Rota= trials—those of Verres, Clodius, and Piso- which are excellent examples of the author's power of vivid historical narrative.
The first thing to notice, says Signor Ferrero, is that Americanism is not a new thing. It may have few affinities with the mediaeval ages of faith, but it has many with the Greek and Roman world. There you can find many similar phenomena. Take, for example, the public munificence of the rich in America to-day. You bad the same thing in Athens and in Rome ; Herodes Atticus, of the second century A.D., was an earlier Mr. Carnegie. America of to-day, again, is not bureaucratic ; an immense number of her public offices are elective, as in the ancient world. In American law the discretionary power of a chief magistrate, through injunctions, is uncommonly like the Roman edictum. America is young • Ancient Borne and Modern America: a Comparative Study of Morals and Manner,. By Gugliekno Ferrero. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [8s. 6d. beta
and Europe old, but Europe was once young, and the charac- teristics of the youth of both are very much alike. Signor Ferrero is against cheap moralizations from faulty comparisons between our own and the Roman world, but he points out certain likenesses which are too ominous to disregard. " L'histoire," as he quotes, "est un recomnzencement perpituel."
The disease which killed the Roman Empire was excessive urbanization. The countryside was depleted to fill the Roman towns, and to feed and amuse the overgrown urban populations agriculture was weighted down with burdens. " In the fields, which were expected to feed all these men who had crowded to the cities to work or to idle, there was a dearth of peasants to cultivate the land. Also, with the disappear- ance of the rural population, the problem of recruiting the army, which drew its soldiers then, as always, from the
country, became increasingly serious. When the cities tricked themselves out with magnificent-monuments, the Empire was threatened with a dearth of bread and of soldiers." It is much
the same to-day. Everything is rising in price—because of the growth of industrialism, says Signor Ferrero. To this cause he attributes the high cost of living in America. In itself it is not a fatal thing, for it will correct itself if left alone. The danger is deadly only when you try, as Rome did, to abolish the evil by artificial means—if you cosset the cities by under- taking uneconomic public works and distributing cheap food, instead of letting them face the crisis they have brought about and adjust their life to meet it.
But the most serious trait which the world to-day has in common with the Roman Empire is the " mania for grandeur and display, the spirit of sterile public and private rivalry," the materialism which disregards quality and worships quantity. This brings us to the really important part of Signor Ferrero's thesis, his analysis of what he calls Americanism—an analysis, let us add, which has nothing in the world to do with ancient Rome. America, and that in Europe which is Americanized, pride themselves on being progressive, but progress is a term capable of several definitions. "The same act may be judged as a phenomenon of progress or of decadence, according as it is • viewed from the standpoint of quality or of quantity."
Progress, as we generally interpret it to-day, involves liberty as against the old restraints, material aggrandisement as against qualitative perfection. Such an interpretation would seem to make for the creation of an opulent barbarism rather than civilization, but the curious thing is that, materialistic as it appears, it is accepted by its votaries with something of the fervour of idealism. Americanism has a touching faith in the power of man to rectify and control nature :-
"Even in what are called social works, the American often seemed to me more idealist, more of a dreamer, and less practical than the European ; more ready, that is to say, to venture on a struggle against the innumerable ills of life without being quite sure of procuring adequate means for conquering them, at the summons of a mystical faith in the progress of the world."
Modern progress depends upon the discovery and use of highly efficient machines, and to a society based upon machinery the quantitative criterion must obviously be the supreme criterion of production. And this quantitative criterion becomes in time a " transcendent and mystical idea which inflames America with passion and impels it to accomplish the new and rapid conquest of its own territory. . . . Doubtless to work with frenzied zeal at creating riches in order to be unable to enjoy them is an absurdity if judged in the light of the interest of each individual ; but are not all ideals absurd if judged in the light of the interest of the individual " But America, having conquered the ancient culture of Europe, is herself being conquered by it. It is the old story of Greece and Rome. Quantity soon satiates, and after a time man must try to translate it into quality. Snobbery,
says Signor Ferrero, is only an effort to effect this translation We see this in the anxiety of the new-rich to furnish their houses with old and beautiful things. They have no art of their own ; indeed, the qualities of their age are utterly hostile to artistic excellence ; so their instinct turns to an earlier age. This means that it can never be completely satisfied, and our modern world must always show a certain lack of balance.
The two worlds of quantity and quality, of speed and per-' fection, will never unite, will always struggle for leadership.
The working classes, Signor Ferrero thinks, come best out of the business :—
" History often has strange surprises in store. The civilization of machinery tended at its birth to appear as a death-blow to the working classes, a godsend to the upper classes. For years and years Socialism, generalizing from the initial rubs, predicted and pretended to prove that the great mechanical industry must enrich a small oligarchy inordinately, and reduce to the blackest wretchedness the great mass of the population ; that a new feudalism of capitalists, fiercer than the barons of the Middle Ages, would seize all the good things of the world. A century passes, and we find this civilization giving complete satisfaction only to the workmen, because it can content the workmen only from the double point of view of quantity and quality. It gives them an abundance which only a small fraction of the people enjoyed up to a century ago ; and, at the same time, bestows on them a luxury which fully satisfies their simple and unsophisti- cated aesthetic sense."
But there is more in modern progress than a loss of artistic aptitude. Liberty and energy are very near licence, and the refinements of morality are in danger of going the way of the refinements of art. Quousque tandem—that is the problem before the whole world to-day. Americanism is full of idealism. It would dominate the physical world, but it yearns too for quality. Its aim is to be all-inclusive, and its philosophy, Pragmatism, as Signor Ferrero acutely points out, is an attempt to accept all ideas, even those which seem mutually exclusive, provided they can be shown to have practical value But it demands contradictory things. It asks both for speed and for perfection, for liberty and for discipline, for abundant quantity and the highest quality. Somehow a balance must be struck. The duty before our civilization to-day is to realize that there is a point where the demand for liberty endangers the most precious fruits of liberty, and that the mastery of the whole world may be attended with the loss of a man's soul.
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