In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but transformation.  Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again.  In Holland, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no decadence at all.  There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so many countries; no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation.  What happened was, first a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day; then this period of command passed, and the State revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves, and play again a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course of affairs was different.  When the Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved.  Every form of luxury and frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy for generations.  The nation had lost all patriotism.  It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered in helpless misery among the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for a spoil.  It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth.  It was not all mere destruction.  Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins.  In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy.  Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, cannot unfairly be compared with classic Greece.  Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new birth.