Alexander Tytler (d. 1813) believed that democratic forms of government — like ancient Greece and Rome — have a natural evolution from initial virtue toward eventual corruption and decline, “Patriotism always exists in the greatest degree in rude nations, and in an early period of society. Like all other affections and passions, it operates with the greatest force where it meets with the greatest difficulties … but in a state of ease and safety, as if wanting its appropriate nourishment, it languishes and decays.” … “It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grander and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues.”
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