Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/128

Rh happened most often in ancient times, when men and States were more rapacious even than now.

Thirdly, States may perish through their own vice, moral or political. Their national institutions may be a defective machine which works badly, and fails of producing national welfare of body or spirit. It may not secure national unity of action—there being no national gravitation of the great masses which fly asunder; or it may fail of individual variety of action — ^having no personal freedom; excessive national gravitation destroys individual cohesion, and pulls the people flat; the men are slaves; they cannot reach the moral and spiritual welfare necessary for a nation's continuous life. In both these cases the vice is political; the machinery is defective, made after false ideas. Or when the institutions are good and capable of accommodating the nation's increase and growth, the vice may be moral, lying deeper in the character of the people. They may have a false and unimprovable form of religion, which suits not the nature of man or of God, and which consequently produces a false system of morals, and so corrupts the nation's heart. They may become selfish, gross, cowardly, atheistic, and so decay inwardly and perish. If left all alone, such a people will rot down and die of internal corruption. Mexico is in a perishing condition to-day; so is Spain; so are some of the young nations of South America, and some of the old of Asia and Europe. Nothing can ever save Turkey,—not all the arms of all the allied West; and though Protestant and Catholic join hands, Christendom cannot propagate Mahometanism, nor keep it from going down.

Leave these nations to their fate and they will die. But commonly, they are not left to themselves; other people rush in and conquer. The wild individual man is rapacious by instinct. The present nations are rapacious also by calculation; they prey on feeble States. The hooded crow of Europe watches for the sickly sheep. In America the wolves prowl round the herd of buffaloes and seize the sickly, the wounded, and the old. And so there are scavengers of the nations,—fillibusters, the flesh-flies and carrion-vultures of the world, who have also their function to perform. Wealth and power are never left without occupants. Home was corrupt, her institutions