The Progressive Farmer And Southern Farm Gazette

FOOTPRINTS OF THE AGES.

I.--The Nations of Old, How They Rose and Fell.

At sundry times and in divers manners nations and civilizations rose and flourished in time past and lapsed into barbarism, no more to fill a place in the world's history. The rise and fall, development and decay, triumphs and defeats of nations and institutions crowd each other in rapid succession from title page to finis of history's ponderous tome, rich with the spoils of time. Are we to-day building permanently?

Egypt thought she had secured permanency. Drunk with dominion she gloated in her supremacy, wasted and brutalized the lives of myriads of whip-lashed slaves to rear pyramids to the vanity of the Pharaohs; but the hundred gates of Thebes have crumbled and her tombs lost to the dust they were built to commemorate; and Egypt is the pawn of men whose progenitors wore skins, fought with clubs and lived in caves when the Ptolemies wore woven robes and bore glittering blades.

So thought Greece, the darling of the ancient world, "the cradle of learning." She built beautifully. The treasuries of nations gilded her domes and made her ruffled peninsulas an enchanted realm. The shores of the Bosphorus rang with the peans of Byzantium, a mart of power, and Athens, the capital city, was a wilderness of marble. Art, eloquence, philosophy, generalship, heroism, culture, literature and glory found in her a patron and sought her encircling arms. Was she not building for all time to come? Yet, in solemn awe we gaze upon the jumbled stone-heaps on the Athenian hills.

So thought Rome. She answered the cosmic urge, founded, built, conquered, ruled,--debauched and died. She took charge of the progress of the world, carried it forward to heights hitherto unknown -and tossed it into the sea. Rome is the tomb of the progress of a continent and the culminant civilization of four thousand years. The light of ages whose chiefs, scholars and men of iron are yet the fount at which the panting mind may drink deeply. Mother of dead empires whose broken thrones and temples shelter 'neath the cypress, the owl and the bat! The dust of her sepulchers scattered long ago. Crumbled works of genius mark the graves of a world, a mirage of ruin.

Feudalism built castles all over Europe to stand the wreck of time, and from which the world was to be governed. The feudal lords built these castles and held sycophant monarchs as proteges of their bureaucratic power, planned for a thousand years, ruled by force, gloated in their pitiless pride over the vanquished, and revelled in the wealth and luxuries of spoilation,--till young democracy brandished the sword of revolt and defiance,-and the earth

trembled with the march of militant feet. Some of these castles stand yet, stern and quiet against the sky. No echoes of the chieftain's footfall sound in the big halls that once resounded with merriment and acclaims when festivities crowded them with those in power. Grass grows between the stones and bats fly at night where royalty once revelled and planned to tax and plunder.

Lack of proper conservation of resources and just administration of government will bring the same results now they brought in days of old. Already we are challenging destiny only to become the whispers of a legend. To be unmindful of the law of recompense is to defy fate and be cast into the junk-heap. "The ruins of America" may some time attest our folly and lack of statesmanship.