Page:The inequality of human races (1915).djvu/26

THE INEQUALITY OF HUMAN RACES industry and commerce for luxury and corruption. Where so many errors reign, I certainly agree that we have "bad government."

I have not the least desire to write a polemic; my object is merely to show how an idea common to Thucydides and the Abbé Raynal can produce quite opposite results. It makes for conservatism in the one, for an anarchic cynicism in the other — and is an error in both. The causes usually given for the fall of nations are not necessarily the real causes ; and though I willingly admit that they may come to the surface in the death-agony of a people, I deny that they have enough power, enough destructive energy, to draw on, by themselves, the irremediable catastrophe.