WAR AND MANHOOD gi 



serve the same purpose. More than once it has served it. The decline 

 of a people can have but one cause, the decline in the type from which 

 it draws its sires. A herd of cattle can degenerate in no other way 

 than this, and a race of men is under the same laws. By the rise in 

 absolute power, as a sort of historical barometer, we may mark the 

 decline in the breed of the people. We see this in the history of Eome. 

 The conditional power of Julius Caesar, resting on his own tremendous 

 personality, showed that the days were past of Cincinnatus and of 

 Junius Brutus. The power of Augustus showed the same. But the 

 decline went on. It is written that " the little finger of Constantine 

 was thicker than the loins of Augustus." The emperor in the time of 

 Claudius and Caligula was not the strong man who held in check all 

 lesser men and organizations. He was the creature of the mob, and the 

 mob, intoxicated with its own work, worshipped him as divine. Doubt- 

 less the last emperor, Augustulus Eomulus, before he was thrown into 

 the scrap-heap of history, was regarded in the mob's eyes and his own 

 as the most godlike of them all. 



What have the historians to say of these matters? Very few have 

 grasped the full significance of their own words, for very few have 

 looked on men as organisms, and on nations as dependent on the 

 specific character of the organisms destined for their reproduction. 



So far as I know, Benjamin Franklin was the first to think of man 

 thus as an inhabitant, a species in nature among other species and de- 

 pendent on nature's forces as other animals and other inhabitants 

 must be. 



In Otto Seeck's great history of "The Downfall of the Ancient 

 World" ("Der Untergang der Antiken Welt"), he finds this down- 

 fall due solely to the rooting out of the best (" Die Ausrottung der 

 Besten"). The historian of the "Decline and Fall of the Koman 

 Empire," or any other empire, is engaged solely with the details of the 

 process by which the best men are exterminated. Speaking of Greece, 

 Dr. Seeck says, "A wealth of force of spirit went down in the suicidal 

 wars." " In Rome, Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds 

 and thousands. Sulla destroyed the democrats, and not less thoroughly. 

 Whatever of strong blood survived fell as an offering to the proscription 

 of the Triumvirate." " The Romans had less of spontaneous force to 

 lose than the Greeks. Thus desolation came to them sooner. Whoever 

 was bold enough to rise politically in Rome was almost without ex- 

 ception thrown to the ground. Only cowards remained and from their 

 brood came forward the netr generations. Cowardice showed itself in 

 lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and traditions." 



The Romans of the Republic could not have made the history of the " 

 Roman Empire. In their hands it would have been still a republic. 

 Could they have held aloof from world-conquering schemes, Rome 



