Thomas Mott Osborne: “in 2003, I was privileged to hear British Prime Minister Tony Blair speak in this Chamber, and one comment he made that…”

“in 2003, I was privileged to hear British Prime Minister Tony Blair speak in this Chamber, and one comment he made that particularly caught my attention was this: He said, ``As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact it is transient.'' What he was referring to, I believe, was that all great nations, when things are going well, assume that they are going to go on forever. But history shows us with example after example that this is really fallacious reasoning. So we might examine three such instances. First of all, going clear back to Rome, which ruled nearly the entire civilized world 2,000 years ago, Rome appeared to be invincible, but eventually it fell. The reasons given generally by historians are these: There was a general decline in morality; there was an increasing corruption and instability in leadership; an increasing public addiction to every more violent public spectacles; an increase in crime and prostitution; and a population that became more self-absorbed, apathetic and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good. Secondly, we might look at Great Britain itself. Certainly Great Britain has not fallen from preeminence, but it certainly is not the power it once was during the 1600s up through much of the 1800s, when it really dominated the entire world.…”