Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/431

 forces. Down to the year 300 of the Christian era they were little changed, and in spite of Plato and the sceptics were more chaotic than ever. The experience of three thousand years had educated society to feel the vastness of nature, and the infinity of her resources of power, but even this increase of attraction had not yet caused economies in its methods of pursuit.

There the western world stood till the year A. D. 305, when the Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the scandalous failure of civilisation at the moment it had achieved complete success. In the year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law and Free Trade should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in advance of the point reached by modern society in the four hundred years since 1500, when conditions were less simple.

The efforts to explain, or explain away, this scandal had been incessant but none suited Adams unless it were the economic theory of adverse exchanges and exhaustion of minerals; but nations are not ruined beyond a certain point by adverse exchanges, and Rome had by no means exhausted her resources. On the contrary the empire developed resources and energies quite astounding. No four hundred years of history before A. D. 1800 knew anything like it; and although some of these developments, like the Civil Law, the roads, aqueducts and harbors, were rather economies than force, yet in northwestern Europe alone the empire had developed three energies,—France, England and Germany,—competent to master the world. The trouble seemed rather to be that the empire developed too much energy, and too fast.

A dynamic law requires that two masses—nature and man—must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive. The theory seems to exact excess, rather than deficiency, of action and re-action to account for the dissolution of the Roman empire, which should, as a problem of mechanics, have been torn to pieces by acceleration. If the student means to try the experiment of framing a dynamic law, he must assign values to the forces of attraction that caused the trouble; and in this case he has them in plain evidence.