With great injustice and cruelty the French drove out the
Huguenots, but in expelling these sons of faith, genius,
industry, virtue, the French fatally impoverished their national
life, and they are suffering to-day from these missing elements
which none may restore. It is impossible for a people to
increase in material wealth and political consideration while
its true grandeur, its greatness of soul, is gradually passing
away. Very strange and subtle are the causes of the decay of
nations, and little by little, quite unconsciously, does a
people lose the great qualities which made it. Poets lose their
fire, artists their imagination, merchants their enterprise,
statesmen their sagacity, soldiers their heroism, the people
their self-control; literature becomes commonplace, art
lifeless, great men dwindle into mediocrities, good men perish
from the land, and the glory of a nation departs, leaving only a
shell, a shadow, a memory. Retribution may not come suddenly,
but it will come.--W. L. WATKINSON, “The Transfigured
Sackcloth.”
(2767)
=Retribution, Just=--See RESPONSIBILITY EVADED.