ABSTRACT
But it is surely difIerent with a community, where generation succeeds generation, and new lives in endless sucoession replaoe the old 1 The deoline and fall of a nation is an instanoe of mortality beyond our reckoning. It is oatastrophic. It is a failure of the source of life, a failure in the natural prooess of sooiety. For sociaJ. rejuvenation would seem as much a natural law as individual senesoence. It seems as natural that life should renew itself in suooeeding generations as that it grows old in each. The dissolution of a nation seems therefore a catastrophe of nature, not, like death of an individual, a fulfilment of nature. Though every individual dies, life may go on unabated, but if a people die, a whole area of life is lost.
