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, because of shortcomings on her part to which
both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed.
Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being
such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of
the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency.
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