A Good Nation is a River and Not a Pond

If a nation wants its history to keep flowing like a river, it must endeavor to raise itself to a higher level of culture, politics, economic progress, and technological excellence every fifty years. If the nation cannot manage that then its river will stop flowing. Its river will transform into a pond whose surface is covered with green algae and on whose banks there exist the “human scum” who have lost their intellect, enterprise, and sense of culture and morality, and who subsist by feeding on the pond’s rotten algae and fish and on the weeds growing on the land.