e 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.

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