WHY NATIONS DECLINE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 82, 15 May 1908, Page 3

WHY NATIONS DECLINE.

Mr Balfour, in the course of a recent address at Cambridge on ' National Decadence,' said that the' decadence respecting which he desired to put questions was not literary or artistic, but political and national, the decadence which was alleged to attack communities and civilisations, and which was to societies of men what senility was to man. To Macaulay it seemed natural that ages hence a" country like New Zealand should be flourishing, and that an old country like England should have decayed. But why should civilisation thus wear out and great communities decay, and what evidence was there that in fact they did ? In the cases where a forward movement had died away, either external conditions were unfavourable or the customs and beliefs, which made society possible, had hardened into shapes which made its further development impossible, or through weariness the community had resigned itself to stagnation, or it shattered itself in pursuit of impossible ideals. A new social force had come into being, the modern alliance between pure sconce and industry; and in that we must mainly rely for the improvement of the material conditions under which societies lived. If in the last hundred years the whole material setting of civilised life had altered, we owed it neither to politicians nor to political institutions, but to the efforts of those who had advanced and applied science. If our outlook upon the universe had suffered modifications amounting to a revolution, it j was to men of science w.e owed it; not ! to theologians or philosophers. Science was the great instrument of social change. Democracy is an excellent thing (continued Mr Balfour), but though quite consistent with progress, it is not progressive per se. Its value is regulative, not organic ; and, if it meant (as it never does) social uniformity instead of equality, we

should become fossilised at once. Movement may b: controlled or checked by the many ; it is initiated and made effective by the few. If we suppose mental capacity to be mensurable, and then imagine two societies possessing the same average capacity—but an average made up in the one case of equal units, in the other of a majority slightly below the average, and a minority much above it —few can doubt that the second, not the first, would show the greatest aptitude for movement. It might go wrong, but it would go.''