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beauty of the contemporaries of Pericles, did not save others who belonged to the same stock, and who still remained pre-eminent for mental accomplishments, from that moral decay which rendered them the scorn of the Romans. The adroit Greek adventurer, who could assume every shape for money, was in the times of the Empire the ideal of all that was mean and contemptible. Neither did the coarser but more vigorous fibre of the Roman national character hold out against corrupting influences. The descendants of the Scipios cared more for their fish-ponds than for their liberties in the time of Cæsar, and the depravity and worthlessness of the same aristocracy in the time of Tacitus was something which the modern imagination finds it difficult to conceive. The intensity of the evil is only fully brought out where the light of Christianity is thrown upon it, as is done in the epistles of St. Paul.

Italian Republics.

The advance guard of modern European civilization consisted of the people of Northern Italy. The virgin soil of the fresh Lombard race was the first to receive the seeds of the Greek and Roman culture, immeasurably enriched as they were by combination with Christianity, and it soon sent up a noble growth of organized valour, policy, literature, and commerce. But the early ripeness of the Italian republics was followed by early decay. The men of iron became men of silk, and the sword grew too heavy for their enervated hands; yet wealth continued to advance, and the commercial prosperity of Italy was at its height, when companies of "Free Lances," like that of the English Hawkwood, kept the degraded inhabitants of the towns in continual terror. Whatever hopes may be entertained of the regeneration of the Italian people at the present day, the fact of their having fallen from a lofty height of moral and national power is too palpable to be denied.

Spain and Turkey.

Perhaps the most striking and even frightful case of national decay is presented by Spain, and especially by the Spanish aristocracy, amongst whom the noble spirit of Christian chivalry survived longer than in any other part of Europe. The moral stature of the most eminent Spaniards of the sixteenth century was gigantic. The greatest commanders, whether by land or by sea, were of that nation, and the contemporaries of Ximenes, Gonsalvo, and the first American discoverers, were men whose capacity of great thought and heroic endurance might well make even England tremble. What a contrast between those and their effete descendants, whose imbecility, both in council and at the head of armies, a Wellington found harder to contend with than the valour of his foes, in those great achievements which delivered the Peninsula!

The Ottoman Empire never reached so high a pitch of moral attainment as Christian Spain, but its history affords a no less startling illustration of the rapidity with which the process of moral decomposition may sometimes proceed. In the fifteenth century, the enthusiasm and perfect discipline of the Turks rendered them so formidable-not to one country alone, but to the whole of Western Europe-as to impel many of the leading minds of Christendom to the project of a new crusade. the commencement of the Lutheran Reformation the same people still held the undisputed naval ascendancy of the Mediterranean. Within about fifty years that ascendancy was totally and for ever destroyed at the Battle of Lepanto, and before the close of the sixteenth century, the Turkish Government had shrunk, from habits of self-indulgence and loss of discipline in those by whom its power was sustained, to that moral decrepitude which has gradually rendered its hold of one of the fairest portions of Europe dependent upon the policy or the forbearance of other nations.

Nature of Moral Decay.

National decay in all these cases is properly a corruption, and differs as much from mere barbarism as old age does from childhood. In a rude primitive people, there is observable a certain balance or harmony between their intellectual and moral powers. Their passions are coarse, but their intellectual perceptions are dull, and the outbreaks of appetite and anger alternate with flashes of generosity and compassion, which show the higher nature struggling to break the bonds which degrade it. But in the corruption of a civilized nation, there is presented the fearful spectacle of the ascendancy of the lower passions, with intellect and imagination employed in their service. They have looked upon the heavenly light, and have voluntarily turned back into darkness.

The disturbance of that rude harmony of the faculties which Nature gives to her least favoured children, and which often survives in a peasantry after a ruling class has become corrupt, is the result of new stimulants, arising from the possession of new means of gratification, being addressed to the senses. In this way the barbarous races in contact with civilized man are almost invariably corrupted, and whatever their previous barbarism might have been, the change is a real demoralization. National corruption, then, may be said to consist of two thingsa disproportionate development of all the impulses leading to personal gratification, and a loosening or destruction of numerous traditional restraints, by which indulgence was more or less controlled, and individual wills held habitually in subjection. It is evident that such corruption may be for a long time accompanied by a high artistic, intellectual, and commercial development. The Roman virtue was gone when the greatest of Roman intellects destroyed the last trace of liberty, and both literature and luxurious indulgence were at their height in the age of Augustus. It is quite true that moral decay is certain to be ultimately followed by that of the intellectual faculties, but the latter may long survive the cor

ruption of the nobler powers, and, strictly speaking, it is only by the subservience of intellect and imagination that corruption reaches its highest intensity.

It may be well to examine, though it must be in a very brief and imperfect manner, whether any of these appearances of decay are at present observable in the chief civilized nations of the world. With this view I shall make a few remarks upon appearances which may be noted in France, the United States, and England. Are there any signs in those countries of a tendency towards that state of things in which the ascendancy of the more ignoble impulses destroys all that is best in the life of a nation?

France.

It requires very little knowledge of the French people to see that the appetite for sensual enjoyments of all kinds has been whetted to a most dangerous sharpness within the last half century. The upper class is probably superior in moral character to the same class in the days of Louis XV.; but the great bulk of the nation has had its desires aroused by influences from which the misery and oppression of former days was a kind of protection. New wealth has been actually attained by a portion of the middle class, but the passion for new wealth has been universally excited. The popular reading shows the popular taste. What is to be inferred from the universal and greedy perusal of such works as the “Count of Monte Christo" and the "Wandering Jew" but this, that the images on which the mass of minds love to dwell are those of immense wealth, and the varied powers of luxurious enjoyment which it affords? Here, then, is evidence of a great development of the impulses to personal gratification in classes whose position must shut them out from it. Where are the corresponding moral restraints ? Upon this point it would be rash to dogmatize, because the moral restraints operating upon the life of a people often escape the eye of a foreign observer; but

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the evidence is too clear to leave a doubt in the mind of anybody, that the restraining principles of French society have been weakened or destroyed to an extent almost unexampled. In the army, indeed, but in the army alone, there is a stern and perfect discipline sustained by sentiments of the most powerful kind. Whatever may be the case in other respects, the military virtues of the French show no decay. The old valour is still there, and the subordination which gives it effect is only too complete. The work of M. de Vigny, "De la Servitude Militaire," describes the settled principle of self-abnegation, refined and beautiful even in its excess, which makes the French officer an instrument in the hands of his superior, and which, by the invariable laws of moral relation, confers social ascendancy on the body amongst whom it prevails. Let us study the spirit of the French army in the pages of De Vigny, and that of the French bourgeoisie, with reasonable allowance for caricature, in the Jérome Paturot of M. Reybaud, and we shall be at no loss to understand why France must, for a long time to come, obey a Military Government.

It is true, indeed, that in any comprehensive survey of the indications of moral character in France, much is met with which commands not only respect but admiration. The readiness with which the people are moved by appeals made to the more generous feelings, and the lofty self-denial and chivalrous delicacy of sentiment frequently displayed by common workmen, are signally characteristic of France. The revolutionary history, too, is as rich as that of any heroic age in examples of patriotic self-devotion; and even more honourable than those bursts of disinterested enthusiasm is the calm and inflexible adherence to principle shown by particular classes-by both republican artizans and royalist nobles, in their fidelity to their respective political standards; by members of the judicial body, in the honourable discharge of their high trust, without regard to the frowns of power; and still more by the many able journalists, who, in spite of the greatest temptations, have refused to

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