THE LONG HABIT OF LIVING indisposeth us for dying,” saith Sir Thomas Browne, and this holds for peoples as well as for persons. There is little evidence that the kings and nobles of the XIVth Dynasty in Egypt realized that the high civilization of their time was at the point of declension and that the Hyksos anarchy was just around the corner. So also with the last of the Athenians The great landholders and the military dictators of Britain and Gaul, seeing low clouds on the horizon, thought it would not be much of a shower; the French aristocrats of the Court of the last Bourbons ate, drank, and made merry, with no thought on the morrow they were to die. Foreknowledge of things to come is granted only to a few; ability to estimate the nature of contemporary conditions to fewer still
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