l self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the
nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great
slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a country-side of
peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like
acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the
citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the
State, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does
not explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so
far as different matters were concerned; at one time as regards
literature, at another time as regards architecture, at another time
as regards city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome's
dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the
impoverishment and depopulation of the Empire, its fall would be quite
sufficiently explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had
lost the fighting edge--an essential even under a despotism, and
therefore far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such
as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is
rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during
the last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an
Empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or
four centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of
literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second
century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of
energy in the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in
Western Europe, but in Africa? We cannot even guess why the springs of
one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of
another kind.

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like
some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the
dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior
in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or
later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which
she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it
could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker
than it needed to come, becaus