Why Rome Fell Is Why Western Civilization Is Falling!

"The two greatest problems in history," says J. S. Reid - brilliant scholar of our time, and author of Cambridge Medieval History - are "How to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall."

“We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause buy many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell.”

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”

“Barbarian inroads, and centuries of mining the richer veins had doubtless lowered Rome's supply of precious metals. In central and southern Italy, deforestation, erosion, and the neglect of irrigation canals by diminishing peasantry and a disordered government had left Italy poorer than before.

The cause, however, was no inherent exhaustion of the soil, no change in climate but the negligence and sterility of harassed and discouraged men.”

“So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Emperor Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them.”

“The holocausts of war and revolution, and perhaps the operation of conception, abortion, and infantcide, had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect; the ablest men married last, bred last, and died sooner. The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich - Rome was not conquered by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication from within.

“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them.

Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.”

These excerpts are from the Epilogue, page 665 - 667, titled 'Why Rome Fell' in the book 'Ceasar and Christ - A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their Beginnings to A.D. 325' - authored by Will Durant and published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944.

Do you notice any similarities from ‘Why Rome Fell’ to why ‘Western Civilization Is Falling?’