The Prized Treasures

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  “Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? . . . .   The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.” Jerome K. Jerome, “T...

"Revival Can Save A Nation" By Al Whittinghill

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"For hundreds of years historians and scholars have carefully studied and evaluated the factors that have caused the decline and death of great empires. Their careful conclusions are readily available to those who really want to know them. Scholars like Edward Gibbon, who wrote the classic "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and Arnold Toynbee, who wrote "A Study of History," have set forth in great clarity and detail that twenty-one of the last great empires on earth all showed the same common signs of decline just before they dissolved and disappeared from world history. This simply cannot be refuted by any honest person!

History is littered with the remains of once great empires, each one having had their turn at the very helm of the world, rising so high, yet today they are only a memory. Will this be true of America? Many historians have catalogued the "commonalities of calamity" or "the pathology of death" for human societies, and the diagnosis is alarming! Nations do not really die; they dissolve, a slow process of erosion. They self-destruct due to disintegration caused by dangers lurking within. Let us list those common symptoms of the end, "harbingers of death" shared by all twenty-one of the last great extinct societies . . ."

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