Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/150

 orbits, as they rise to glory and sink into decay. They begin in a low estate, with industry and ail the virtues that are born of weakness and poverty, till growing strength turns their humility to pride, and wealth and power induce the luxury and its attendant vices which are the sure precursors of ruin. These are only different forms of one disease — an universal selfishness, which eats out the manhood of a people, as concealed rottenness eats out the heart of the oak, and causes at last even the giant of the forest to come thundering to the ground. By these things nations die. It was this internal decay and rottenness which destroyed the Roman empire, and may destroy the most powerful of modern states.

To meet such dangers, how weak and puny are the pretentious devices of political economists! In these last days, when men boast as if they had attained all wisdom and all knowledge, the economists claim to have reduced government to a science, which they have mastered as completely as the students of natural science have mastered chemistry; and yet, to judge from the frequent failures in the most civilized countries, from the rebellions and revolutions, this science of government is still but imperfectly understood. Does science furnish any antidote for selfishness? Does a knowledge of chemistry change the internal composition of a man's nature? Alas! that we must confess that these things do not alter human character; that men may be learned and scientific, and yet be as supremely selfish as before. It is a sad commentary on the moral power, or rather the moral weakness, of science and civilization, that the nation which claims to be the most highly civilized, and which is the most devoted to science, is the one which has had the most revolutions, and which has more than once been petrified and set aghast by a Reign of Terror.