The social edifice, then, has been abandoned; the crowd has burst
into the wood-yard; columns, capitals, and plinths, wood, stone,
and metal, have been distributed in portions and drawn by lot:
and, of all these materials collected for a magnificent temple,
property, ignorant and barbarous, has built huts. The work
before us, then, is not only to recover the plan of the edifice,
but to dislodge the occupants, who maintain that their city is
superb, and, at the very mention of restoration, appear in
battle-array at their gates. Such confusion was not seen of old
at Babel: happily we speak French, and are more courageous than
the companions of Nimrod.
But enough of allegory: the historical and descriptive method,
successfully employed so long as the work was one of examination
only, is henceforth useless: after thousands of monographs and
tables, we are no further advanced than in the age of Xenophon
and Hesiod. The Phenicians, the Greeks, the Italians, labored in
their day as we do in ours: they invested their money, paid their
laborers, extended their domains, made their expeditions and
recoveries, kept their books, speculated, dabbled in stocks, and
ruined themselves according to all the rules of economic art;
knowing as well as ourselves how to gain monopolies and fleece
the consumer and laborer.
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