"Nations, once fallen, seldom rise again." Thoughts by C. Chauncey Burr during the Civil War.

Copperhead, C. Chauncey Burr, saw in the Civil War the potential of a fundamental decay of the nations principles. This was alarming for Burr since, quoting an unidentified source, he wrote that "there is no resurrection" for nations.

Of interest in this post are the lessons Burr draws from Rome and its slide from "the Republic into the Empire."

August Glen-James, editor

Augustus knew that none but a nation of slaves and cowards would long submit to have their freedom of speech restrained, as that is a point at which the people most easily realize their loss of liberty.

Nations, once fallen, seldom rise again. The innate vigor of a people, when once it is exhausted, rarely recruits itself for a second youth. Nations, like individuals, have their periods of growth and decay; and when the symptoms of decline or disintegration manifest themselves, it is usually hopeless to arrest their inevitable progress. This sad history has been repeated in many of earth’s noblest people. The culminating point in the national development is but a moment; and the same law of progress which had forced it upward, by the effort of successive generations, now, as by an ebb, relentlessly draws it downward, when once that moment is past. In most cases, the backward movement cannot be stayed: the nation sinks irrecoverably to its fall. ‘For nations,’ it has been said by a great author, ‘there is no resurrection.’

Why do these reflections—the awful words—fall upon us like a funeral-bell at the present moment? Our nation, though in the throes of revolution, is neither worn out nor exhausted. It is not old, and can have none of the decay of age about it. But there have been nations which, like individuals, have grown old in their youth, and perished ere middle age. There is such a thing as breaking down a nation’s constitution in its youth; and what but inevitable decay and ruin lies beyond it then? The very forces of youth, when once the constitutional framework of government is shattered, hurry [the] whole body of state on to swifter destruction.

Augustus knew that none but a nation of slaves and cowards would long submit to have their freedom of speech restrained, as that is a point at which the people most easily realize their loss of liberty. The policy of the Caesars seems to have been to slide the Republic into the Empire so gracefully and imperceptibly, that the people could take no timely alarm by perceiving the least abridgment of their liberties.— Such is the difference between great and sagacious usurpers and small and foolish men. After the fall of the Roman Republic, and during the first five decades of the Empire, there was little perceptible change in the constitutional structure of the government.