128 The Lesson of History 



thoughts of men and totally altered the history of our 

 Western civilisation. Nowhere has this influence been 

 more lucidly considered than in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's 

 " Social Evolution," published in 1902. He there deals 

 with the great Greek civilisation and the rise and fall 

 of the Roman Empire. He shows that notwithstanding 

 the immense intellectual vigour of the ancient Greeks 

 and their ethical philosophy of a very high order there 

 was no permanence ; like a great meteor, it vanished 

 into the empyrean, never again to reappear. The 

 Roman civilisation — with its colossal military organisa- 

 tion, with its great inherent force and energy, possessed 

 of a succession of rulers of extraordinary intellectual 

 gifts — passed away like a dream of the night. This rise 

 and fall of empires has created a caste of thought which 

 prevails at the present day among nearly all civilised 

 and intellectual men, and has established firmly as an 

 axiom of history the idea that all nations from small 

 beginnings come to maturity and, after a career of glory 

 and conquest more or less prolonged, decline and pass 

 into that obscurity whence they came, in obedience to 

 an immutable law. All great states in the world's 

 history which have attained to pre-eminence have, in 

 the process of the suns, as surely declined and suffered 

 eclipse. It is therefore at the present time an article of 

 faith with the vast majority of mankind that just as a 

 man is born into this world, attains to full physical and 

 mental vigour, and with advancing years suffers decay 

 and eventually death, so it is with nations and empires ; 

 and none may escape this unalterable decree. It is 

 permissible, however, at this stage of the world's 

 history to doubt the absolute necessity of the con- 

 tinuity of the operation of this law, for the reason that 

 these ancient civilisations were founded on a purely 

 military organisation which necessitated the total sub- 

 ordination of the masses of the people to the service of 



