Page:Biological Analogies in History.djvu/32

 peace being broken, or else to give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in the future.

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burned itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so many countries; no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first a flowering time, in which the country's men of action and men of thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day; then this period of command passed, and the State revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves, and play again a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in