ey crumble
spontaneously away by the process of their own growth.

A nation, like a man, hides from itself the contemplation of its final
day. It occupies itself with expedients for prolonging its present
state. It frames laws and constitutions under the delusion that they
will last, forgetting that the condition of life is change. Very able
modern statesmen consider it to be the grand object of their art to keep
things as they are, or rather as they were. But the human race is not at
rest; and bands with which, for a moment, it may be restrained, break
all the more violently the longer they hold. No man can stop the march
of destiny.

[Sidenote: There is nothing absolute in time.]

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its
duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling. For the same reason
that to the child the year is actually longer than to the adult, the
life of a nation may be said to be no longer than the life of a person,
considering the manner in which its affairs are moving. There is a
variable velocity of existence, though the lapses of time may be
equable.

[Sidenote: Nations are only transitional forms.]

The origin, existence, and death of nations depend thus on physical
influences, which are themselves the result of immutable laws. Nations
are only transitional forms of humanity. They must undergo obliteration
as do the transitional forms offered by the animal series. There is no
more an immortality for them than there is an immobility for an embryo
in any one of the manifold forms passed through in its progress of
development.

[Sidenote: Their course is ever advancing, never retrograde.]

[Sidenote: Variable rapidity of national life.]

The life of a nation thus flows in a regular sequence, determined by
invariable law, and hence, in estimating different nations, we must not
be deceived by the casual aspect they present. The philosophical
comparison is made by considering their entire manner of career or cycle
of progress, and not their momentary or transitory state. Though they
may encounter disaster, their absolute course can never be retrograde;
it is always onward, even if tending to dissolution. It is as with the
individual, who is equally advancing in infancy, in maturity, in old
age. Pascal was more than justified in his assertion that "the entire
succession of men, through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as
one man, always living and incessantly