The theory that the rise, growth, decay, and death of nations depend on physical conditions alone, chiefly on climate and geographical position, seems to us attended with some grave difficulties. Have the climate and geographical positions of India, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, essentially changed from what they were at the epoch of their greatness? Did not all the great and renowned nations of antiquity rise, grow, prosper, decline, and die, in substantially the same physical conditions, under the same climate, and in the same geographical position? Like causes produce like effects. How could the same physical causes cause alike the rise and growth, and the decay and death of one and the same people, in one and the same climate, and in one and the same geographical position? Do you say, climate and even physical geography change with the lapse of time? Be it so. Be it as the author maintains, that formerly there was no variation of climate on this continent, from the equator to either pole; but was there for Rome any appreciable change in the climate and geography from the time of the third Punic war to that of Honorius, or even of Augustulus, the last of the Emperors? Or what change in the physical conditions of the nation was there when it was falling from what there was when it was rising? {170} Nations, like individuals, have, according to the professor, their infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death. But why do nations grow old and die? The individual grows old and dies, because his interior physical machinery wears out, and because he must die in order to attain the end for which he lives. But why should this be the case with nations? They have no future life to which death is the passage. The nation does not rise or fall with the individuals that found it. One generation of individuals passes away, and another comes, but the nation survives; and why, if not destroyed by external violence, should it not continue to survive and thrive to the end of time? There are no physical causes, no known physiological laws, that prevent it. Why was not Rome as able to withstand the barbarians, or to drive them back from her frontiers, in the fourth century, as she was in the first? Why was England so much weaker under the Stuarts than she had been under the Tudors, or was again under the Protector? Or why have we seen her so grand under Pitt and Wellington, and so little and feeble under Palmerston and Lord Russell? Can you explain this by a change of climate and geographical position, or any change in the physical conditions of the nation, that is, any physical changes not due to moral causes?