t's thought, the fanciful physical
metaphor involved in the word "youth," what serious evidence have we
that America is a fresh force and not a stale one? It has a great many
people, like China; it has a great deal of money, like defeated
Carthage or dying Venice. It is full of bustle and excitability, like
Athens after its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline. It
is fond of new things; but the old are always fond of new things.
Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers. It admires
strength and good looks; it admires a big and barbaric beauty in its
women, for instance; but so did Rome when the Goth was at the gates.
All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and
decay. There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can
show itself essentially glad and great--by the heroic in government, by
the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art. Beyond government, which
is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most
significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a
holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight--that is, his way of
accepting life and his way of accepting death.

Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means
as particularly fresh or untouched. She appears with all the weakness
and weariness of modern England or of any other Western power. In her
politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up, into a
bewildering opportunism and insincerity. In the matter of war and the
national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more
manifest and melancholy. It may be said with rough accuracy that there
are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small
power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights
great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but
pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of
its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become
a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very
badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in
the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than
anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a
strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added
to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the
Caracallan tr