The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.
Civilization never stands still; if in one country it is falling back, in another it is changing, evolving, becoming more complicated, bringing fresh experience to body and mind, breeding new desires, and exploiting Nature's cupboard for their satisfaction.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
The chains of military despotism, once fastened upon a nation, ages might pass away before they could be shaken off.
Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.
All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.
In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.
History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?
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