Civilization and Decay 351 



usurer in his most formidable aspect, and the peas- 

 ant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive 

 on scanty nutriment." These two very unattractive 

 types are, in his belief, the inevitable final products 

 of all civilization, as civilization has hitherto devel- 

 oped ; and when they have once been produced there 

 follows either a stationary period, during which the 

 whole body politic gradually ossifies and atrophies, 

 or else a period of utter disintegration. 



This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many re- 

 spects an entirely false theory; l>ut nevertheless 

 there is in it a very ugly element of truth. One 

 does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams's the- 

 ories or all his facts in order to recognize more than 

 one disagreeable resemblance between the world as 

 it is to-day, and the Roman world under the Em- 

 pire, or the Greek world under the successors of 

 Alexander. Where he errs is in his failure to ap- 

 preciate the fundamental differences which utterly 

 destroy any real parallelism between the two sets of 

 cases. Indeed, his zeal in championing his theories 

 leads him at times into positions which are seen at 

 a glance to be untenable. 



Probably Mr. Adams's account of the English 

 Reformation, and of Henry VIII and his instru- 

 ments, is far nearer the truth than Froude's. But his 

 view of the evils upon which the reformers as a 

 whole waged war, and of the spirit which lay behind 

 the real leaders and spurred them on, is certainly 

 less accurate than the view given by Froude in his 

 "Erasmus" and "Council of Trent." It can be 



