THE FALL OF EMPIRES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22356, 29 February 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE FALL OF EMPIRES

OPINIONS OF SANDY

BY KOTAIIR

Sandy had lost an old friend during tho last week and his mind had apparently been occupied with the deepest of problems, the things that pass and the things that remain. As usual, he had been lifting' his difficulties out of their narrow personal bearing and considering them in their widest relations. Anything universal cannot bo evil; its presence in the very constitution of nature indicates that it must bo good in any reasonable interpretation of the word, if we are to assume any purpose in tho whole scheme of things. That is fundamental in his philosophy. It is our insistence on purely personal considerations that blinds us to real values.

"The individual problem," he said, "tends to become so insistent that it obscures for us the real issues. There is only one way into life and only one way out.'That has been so from the beginning. And not only the individual but the group, the nation, the civilisation, all seem subject to the samo inevitable law of mortality. Everything man builds has its beginning and its ending. The history of the world is the record of empires that have risen and held for a time their place in the sun, and then vanished, sometimes without a trace. In our own day the archaeologist has brought to the light of day the long-lost splendours of ancient Powers that had been only a name or that had passed completely from the memory of man. Flow and Ebb " : "You know Spongier's idea that every civilisation, however splendid, has its period of rise, its brief hour of triumph and its inevitable decline. Ho sees the tide of European civilisation moving faster and faster on the ebb that will never turn to flow again. That may bo so; we are too close to the centre of things and too much harassed by the chaotic conditions of a world that has lost the sense of stability with tho obliteration of its landmarks, to be able to pass a judgment on things as they are. But the past is fixed and the page of history is there to be read. "Bryant's truism, 'All that tread tho giobe are but a handful to tho tribes that slumber in its bosom,' is chiefly of value as it emphasises the necessity of studying present problems in the light of the records of the past. Why did great empires rise and why did they fall? The modern mind seeks for reasons apart from tho inscrutable decrees of fate. Nothing happens without a cause. Were the decline and fall of ancient Powers due primarily to forces outside themselves or to a weakening of fibre within tho nation? On a small scale you have tho problem in the history of New Zealand. Within our own times tho last of tho Moriori element in our population has died. A once vigorous race has become extinct. It has been held by some authorities that tho Moriori passed away because of his philosophy of life. He was essentially a pacifist. He did not believe in fighting, and in a world where 'life's a feeht and man's a soger,' he went to the wall. We do not know enough about him to speak with certainty. The records show plenty of examples of peoples that were blotted out by their enthusiasm for war, but no other that I know of where a disbelief in the value of war led to a nation's undoing. But that may be because the Moriori alone, of _all the peoples of the earth, was courageous enough to carry out his pacifist principles. Past GUory

"In central and western Asia there have been vast empires that now have left to the modern world only a few crumbling ruins where the 'wild foy scratches in a heap of dust.'

They say the lion and the lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahrain that great hunter? The wild Stamps o'er his head nnd he lies fast asleep. "Assj'ria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? The glory of Imperial Rome may spur on a Mussolini to a wild quest to restore the ancient splendour —a good enough catchword to excite an emotional people, but a mere beating the air for all that. The forces that operated within the Roman character, and the -opportunity the ancient world gave to a strong imperial people, have passed and will not come again. As I see it, there must always have been the opportunity in the special circumstances of the time,' but above all there must have been an intense vigour of national character widely diffused throughout the people, and the coming of a leader who could direct this force to definite ends. "When leaders wore lacking and when the national character lost its pristine urge and drive under the corrupting influences of success and prosperity, a nation with its native powers still unspent rose to challenge the longaccepted supremacy. So nation after nation went its way. The Hittites, a strong mountain people, establish themselves in A?ia Minor, hold the ramparts to the east against all the great powers of Mesopotamia, meet Egypt on equal terms, dominate a wide area until the national fibre weakens under long prosperity, and then find the western gate forced by the Greeks in the Trojan war. And the Hittites vanish from the scene as swiftly as they had risen to imperial power. Rome •'We know so much of the history of Rome that most of the study of the problem of the decline and fall of great empires has been concentrated on her great and tragic story. Many Romans seemed to think that the old gods had taken vengeance on the land that had cast down their altars. Gibbon and many others find a chief cause of Rome's decline in the disrupting influence of Christianity. It brought in other loyalties that weakened the central loyalty to the State. Others have found the beginning of the end in division of the Empire and the establishment of the rival capital at Constantinople. It has been argued that Roman policy by excessive taxation practically eliminated the middle class, and no great Power can long survive without a strong and secure commercial and professional class. There are some that find the real reason for decay in tlio over-paternal ism of the Roman government. The Romans began to look to the State for everything. Individual enterprise was discouraged. The State flattered and fed anil amused the crowd, and the end of paternalism is a weakened national character. "It seems to como back to the national character, however you look at it. The Romans paid mercenaries to do their fighting for them. The State took I command of practically all the national resources. The peasants were poor and constantly harassed. Long prosperity had undermined the pristine Roman virtue. The national character had become slack and self-indulgent. When out of central and northern Europe there poured the hordes of the Goths, strong, tlirustful, vigorous in their national youth, the ago-old empire fell to pieces. "I think it has nearly always amounted to something like that. When a nation has grown self-satisfied, when the fibres of the national character have become flaccid, no magic formula of statecraft, no brilliance of political theory or control, can long postpone the inevitable day of judgment, it all comes back to what the people are, to what they have allowed the passing centuries to make of the sturdy, selfreliant, honest character that first gave them a place among the imperial races."