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CHAPTER II.

NATIONAL DECAY.

"A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times, when many a subject land

Look'd to the winged lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles !

"She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,

Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,

A ruler of the waters and their powers:

And such she was ;-her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East

Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased.

"In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,

And silent rows the songless gondolier;

Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,

And music meets not always now the ear."-BYRON.

Moral Progress and Decay in Individuals.

If the belief that the human race is moving onwards in a state of uniform moral progression, be in any degree difficult to reconcile with the facts of history, the same thing cannot be said of the belief that particular nations run through successive stages somewhat like those which we mark in the individual as youth, maturity, and decay. This latter opinion was expressed by Bacon in these pregnant words. "In the youth of a State arms do flourish :—in the middle age of a State

learning, and then both of them together for a time; in the declining age of a State, mechanical arts and merchandize."

Looking to the changes which take place in individual character, it is to be feared that moral decay is more common than moral improvement. The courageous truth, the overflowing affection, the prompt self-sacrifice which so often make youth beautiful, are not so apt to be manifested in advanced years. On the contrary, the glorious promise of the dawn is often overcast before the sun is yet midway in its course. The warm impulse gives way to the cold calculation, and the heart, which at the outset of life was a fountain of noble feeling, becomes closed and withered up, and "dry as summer dust," before it returns to the source from which it came. One of the aspects of this truth appears in the well-known lines of Wordsworth :

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This gradual loss of the heavenly light does not indicate moral progress. But if particular men may become hard and selfish, and sink into every kind of moral degradation as they advance in life, such a thing cannot be impossible for societies of men, that is to say, for nations. Accordingly this fact of national decay is not only possible, but one of the most familiar to be met with in history.

Greece and Rome.

The career and fate of Greece are known to every reader. The unrivalled intellectual power and deep sensibility to

beauty of the contemporaries of Pericles, did not save others who belonged to the same stock, and who still remained pre-eminent for mental accomplishments, from that moral decay which rendered them the scorn of the Romans. The adroit Greek adventurer, who could assume every shape for money, was in the times of the Empire the ideal of all that was mean and contemptible. Neither did the coarser but more vigorous fibre of the Roman national character hold out against corrupting influences. The descendants of the Scipios cared more for their fish-ponds than for their liberties in the time of Cæsar, and the depravity and worthlessness of the same aristocracy in the time of Tacitus was something which the modern imagination finds it difficult to conceive. The intensity of the evil is only fully brought out where the light of Christianity is thrown upon it, as is done in the epistles of St. Paul.

Italian Republics.

The advance guard of modern European civilization consisted of the people of Northern Italy. The virgin soil of the fresh Lombard race was the first to receive the seeds of the Greek and Roman culture, immeasurably enriched as they were by combination with Christianity, and it soon sent up a noble growth of organized valour, policy, literature, and commerce. But the early ripeness of the Italian republics was followed by early decay. The men of iron became men of silk, and the sword grew too heavy for their enervated hands; yet wealth continued to advance, and the commercial prosperity of Italy was at its height, when companies of "Free Lances," like that of the English Hawkwood, kept the degraded inhabitants of the towns in continual terror. Whatever hopes may be entertained of the regeneration of the Italian people at the present day, the fact of their having fallen from a lofty height of moral and national power is too palpable to be denied.

Spain and Turkey.

Perhaps the most striking and even frightful case of national decay is presented by Spain, and especially by the Spanish aristocracy, amongst whom the noble spirit of Christian chivalry survived longer than in any other part of Europe. The moral stature of the most eminent Spaniards of the sixteenth century was gigantic. The greatest commanders, whether by land or by sea, were of that nation, and the contemporaries of Ximenes, Gonsalvo, and the first American discoverers, were men whose capacity of great thought and heroic endurance might well make even England tremble. What a contrast between those and their effete descendants, whose imbecility, both in council and at the head of armies, a Wellington found harder to contend with than the valour of his foes, in those great achievements which delivered the Peninsula !

The Ottoman Empire never reached so high a pitch of moral attainment as Christian Spain, but its history affords a no less startling illustration of the rapidity with which the process of moral decomposition may sometimes proceed. In the fifteenth century, the enthusiasm and perfect discipline of the Turks rendered them so formidable-not to one country alone, but to the whole of Western Europe-as to impel many of the leading minds of Christendom to the project of a new crusade. At the commencement of the Lutheran Reformation the same people still held the undisputed naval ascendancy of the Mediterranean. Within about fifty years that ascendancy was totally and for ever destroyed at the Battle of Lepanto, and before the close of the sixteenth century, the Turkish Government had shrunk, from habits of self-indulgence and loss of discipline in those by whom its power was sustained, to that moral decrepitude which has gradually rendered its hold of one of the fairest portions of Europe dependent upon the policy or the forbearance of other nations.

Nature of Moral Decay.

National decay in all these cases is properly a corruption, and differs as much from mere barbarism as old age does from childhood. In a rude primitive people, there is observable a certain balance or harmony between their intellectual and moral powers. Their passions are coarse, but their intellectual perceptions are dull, and the outbreaks of appetite and anger alternate with flashes of generosity and compassion, which show the higher nature struggling to break the bonds which degrade it. But in the corruption of a civilized nation, there is presented the fearful spectacle of the ascendancy of the lower passions, with intellect and imagination employed in their service. They have looked upon the heavenly light, and have voluntarily turned back into darkness.

The disturbance of that rude harmony of the faculties which Nature gives to her least favoured children, and which often survives in a peasantry after a ruling class has become corrupt, is the result of new stimulants, arising from the possession of new means of gratification, being addressed to the senses. In this way the barbarous races in contact with civilized man are almost invariably corrupted, and whatever their previous barbarism might have been, the change is a real demoralization. National corruption, then, may be said to consist of two thingsa disproportionate development of all the impulses leading to personal gratification, and a loosening or destruction of numerous traditional restraints, by which indulgence was more or less controlled, and individual wills held habitually in subjection. It is evident that such corruption may be for a long time accompanied by a high artistic, intellectual, and commercial development. The Roman virtue was gone when the greatest of Roman intellects destroyed the last trace of liberty, and both literature and luxurious indulgence were at their height in the age of Augustus. It is quite true that moral decay is certain to be ultimately followed by that of the intellectual faculties, but the latter may long survive the cor

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