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 ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the
gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of
contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work
throughout Italy for generations.
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