152 THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE, 
various polyps of a colony. Under such conditions true 
patroitism or an active desire to maintain the State could not 
exist. 
We know that there have been many powerful nations, and 
brilliant eras of civilization, anterior to our own, but they 
have sunk beneath the waters, leaving scarcely a bubble on 
the surface of the stream of time. Each nation, doubtless, 
thought its own power would endure as long as the world. 
What would have been the feelings of a priest of Osiris, as he 
paced the stupendous Temples erected on the banks of the 
Nile for the worship of his Gods, if some Cassandra had pre- 
dicted that the time would come when his temples would lie 
in ruins, and when the once proud name of Egyptian would 
signify either a houseless wanderer, or a helpless and hopeless 
slave with his back ever bared to the lash? Without doubt 
he would have laughed her to scorn, as would Cesar, had he 
been told that his world-wide empire would expire, and be- 
come an easy prey to Barbarian hordes from the North 
and East. 
The great empires of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, 
Venice, and many others have all in turn reached a pin- 
nacle of prosperity and then fallen to corresponding depths. 
Is ouy race and is our civilization destined to disappear 
and shall its relics come to be a study for the archeologists 
of the future ? 
From history I can draw no other conclusion than this, 
that, while a nation is militant, and either fighting for its 
existence or for its aggrandisement, the forces of Nature ac; 
in favour of the race and community as a whole, while 
careless of the individual life. When security is attained 
and growth ceases, the conditions are reversed, and become 
favourable to the individual but unfavourable to the race; 
and then the process of decay begins, a continually increasing 
percentage of feeble individuals reaching maturity and re- 
producing their kind, and so the process goes on with ever 
