Somehow the fire went out

Their motto was 'What I have I hold,' and while they remembered it they were great people. But when they stopped holding they went out like a candle, and the last of them is now living in St Malo and a Lancashire cotton-spinner owns the place....When we had to fight hard for our possessions all the time, and give flesh to the sons of dogs who were our clan, we were strong men and women. There was a Raden with Robert Bruce--he fell with Douglas in the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre--and a Raden died beside the King at Flodden--and Radens were in everything that happened in the old days in Scotland and France. But civilisation killed them--they couldn't adapt themselves to it. Somehow the fire went out of the blood, and they became vegetables. Their only claim was the right of property, which is no right at all."

"That's what the Bolsheviks say," said the puzzled Sir Archie."

"Then I'm a Bolshevik. Nobody in the world to-day has a right to anything which he can't justify. That's not politics, it's the way nature works. Whatever you've got--rank or power or fame or money--you've got to justify it, and keep on justifying it, or go under. No law on earth can buttress up a thing which nature means to decay."

John Buchan - John Macnab (1925)

Stirring stuff - but of course it isn’t stirring today and there is a timeless lesson in that. Modern political narratives appeal to weakness not strength. Civilisations cannot thrive on weakness and ours may be that thing which nature means to decay.