At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long transmutation there was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster, on which the human elements of the State organisms concerned were collectively conscious of any great change in their way of life. And days of dire disaster had occurred in the times to which we look back as those of energetic expansion. Early Rome had been actually captured by Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow by Hannibal a whole era before she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had been sacked by the Persians long before the Roman invasion. What was the determining difference in the consciousness of the citizens at the two epochs? Clearly that between the minds of men wont to "fend for themselves" collectively and of men wont to be ruled and prescribed for by a master--a difference, therefore, in power of resistance and of recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought by long mutations--from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood--a thing not easily lost. A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively disinterested analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not inconsiderate survey of the decadence of the old world. At the outset he rightly notes the inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the old idea of an inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and civilisations, while holding no less confidently to the modern notion, practically unattained by the ancients, of an inevitable progress. "Why," he asks, "_should_ civilisations thus wear out and great communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they do?"[429] It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the questioner--who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident reply"--propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself with suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening hold on physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell on the old. But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more complete one.