to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries.  But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in Western Europe, but in Africa?  We cannot even guess why the springs of one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland.  For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul.  Her fall came; it could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed.  Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency.  This was bad enough.  But the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism.  The Dutch were very wealthy.  They grew to believe that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient, as either to insure them against the peace being broken, or else to give them the victory when war came.  To be opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in the future.

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in the world of art and letters.  Some spark of divine fire burned itself out in the national soul.  As the line of great statesmen, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great Dutch painters ended.  The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.