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To this kind of speech, common since the romantic and pre-Raphaelite movement, and getting commoner with the spread of theories of intellectual anarchy and nervous degeneracy, one is often tempted to answer impatiently, "Get out of the way, you wretched young people; don't you see that there isn't room or time for your posing?" But unfortunately it is not all pose.
So it was in Rome. Into whatever abyss of degeneracy the aristocratic rule had now sunk, it had once been a great political system; the sacred fire, by which Italy had been conquered and Hannibal had been vanquished, continued to glow although somewhat dimmed and dull in the Roman nobility so long as that nobility existed, and rendered a cordial understanding between the men of the old regime and the new monarch impossible.
Another point of difference is his fondness in the Odes for commonplaces, e.g. the degeneracy of the age, the necessity of enjoying the moment, which he enforces with every variety of illustration. Neither of these was the result of genuine conviction. And the Epicurean maxims which in them he offers as the sum of wisdom, are in his Epistles exchanged for their direct opposites:
Not that I could wholly give up this last doctrine; for I still read it in the 5th chapter of Romans. But it was clear to me, that whatever that meant, I could not combine it with the idea of degeneracy, nor could I find a proof of it in the fact of prevalent wickedness. Thus I received a shadowy doctrine on mere Scriptural authority; it had no longer any root in my understanding or heart.
When all is summed up, the clearance at the bottom is not less significant than the loss at the top of the social scale. Natural selection works as effectually in toning up the species by weeding out the worst as 'natural selection reversed' works for degeneracy through the removal of the best.
I do not know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule.
Slave revolts, constant petty wars, and piracy were preying on the unhappy provincials, and in the Roman protectorate they found no aid. Thus the misery caused by a meddlesome and nerveless national policy was enhanced by a domestic administration based on turpitude and extortion. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties.
Jean Athanase Polydore Milaud de la Baudraye, his only son, more than delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich men indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age, and thus bring degeneracy into the highest circles of society.
"They are joined to their idols" but now that after years of legislative encroachment upon the rights of suffering humanity, they engage in a rebellious outbreak against a God-given Government, we will not let them alone in an idolatry that desolates the fair face of nature and causes such shameful degeneracy of the human race. Justice! slow, but still sure and retributive justice!
The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might be changed together. The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion.
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