It usually goes down
with a crash, as France did in 1870, or as Russia has just done. The
effect of diminishing economic efficiency is not as suddenly and
dramatically exhibited; but it is no less inevitable and no less severe.
And the service which the very intensity of modern international
competition renders to a living nation arises precisely from the
searching character of the tests to which it subjects the several
national organizations. Austria-Hungary has been forced to assume a
secondary position in Europe, because the want of national cohesion and
vitality deprived her political advance of all momentum. Russia has
suddenly discovered that a corrupt bureaucracy is incapable of a
national organization as efficient as modern military and political
competition requires. It was desirable in the interest of the Austrians,
the Hungarians, and the Russians, that these weaknesses should be
exposed; and if the Christian states of the West ever become so
organized that their weaknesses are concealed until their consequences
become irremediable, Western civilization itself will be on the road to
decline.
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