AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 53 



sion was a sacred duty. They never knew the agitation of that 

 popular strife which, in Rome, ultimately sank under the domi- 

 nation of aristocratic power, and of a soldiery always under its 

 influence. Yet the existence of such divisions, and of class legis- 

 lation as its results, produced, even after many centuries, the 

 downfall of Roman power and greatness. Public baths — public 

 roads — aqueducts — and a system of drainage and sewerage for the 

 city, such as modern ages have never equalled, were nevertheless 

 among the few efforts that Rome made for the social and perma- 

 nent elevation of the people. 



We have spoken briefly of what the Greeks and Romans knew 

 in the best ages of the republic and the Caesars. What they did 

 not know is deducible from the fact that their astronomers had 

 no telescope, their navigators no compass; their knowledge of 

 miilitary tactics was such as a rude and ferocious soldiery might 

 acquire who never smelt powder; their literature, their limited 

 familiarity with the exact sciences, confined of necessity to the 

 few, and insusceptible of diffusion among the many, and this 

 because the printing press was to them a more distant and 

 unknown wonder than was the magnetic telegraph to Faust and 

 Guttenburgh. 



Rome fell, under the savage crowds from northern Europe 

 The fifth century passed away, and through the long night of the 

 dark ages, a thousand years leave no trace of Human Progress. 

 Alexandria had been destroyed, and its library of manuscripts 

 devoted by Mahometan authority to light the fires of the public 

 baths. The Saracenic power had been established and then 

 driven from Spain, leaving nothing better than the ruins of the 

 Alhambra and similar attestations of a power grand in its isola- 

 tion, but inimical to social freedom. The feudal system, the age 

 of chivalry, the establishment of the monastic orders and the 

 inquisition, the separation of the eastern and western churches, 

 the mad crusades, in which millions of men perished miserably — 

 these, and the early promise of that which terminated in an open 

 renunciation of priestly authority by the great spirits of the 

 Reformation, might well occupy our attention, not for an hour, 

 but for a life. Nor from this stand point of the world's progress 



