United States or Bosnia and Herzegovina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These bonds constituted the bulk of the State's liabilities during the first half-cycle of the Meiji era, and when we add the debts of the fiefs, which the Central Government took over; two small foreign loans; the cost of quelling the Satsuma rebellion, and various debts incurred on account of public works, naval construction, and minor purposes, we arrive at the broad fact that the entire national debt of Japan did not exceed 305 million yen at the close of the twenty-eighth year of her new era.
A half-cycle on from that brings us to 36 A.D., the year before Tiberius died: that half-cycle was one, for the Empire all of it, and for Rome most of it, of bright daylight. The next half-cycle ends in 101, in the third year of Trajan: a time, for the most part, of decline, of twilight.
Her forward urge seems to have ended with the death of Pan Chow, or at the end of the half-cycle Han Kwang-wuti began in 35. We might tabulate the two concurrent Han cycles, for the sake of clearness, and note their points of intersection, thus: Western Han Cycle, 130 years Eastern Han Half-Cycle, 65 yrs 35 A.D. Opened by Han Kwang-wuti.
And then, blood from the provinces was always flowing into Rome itself; particularly in the Flavian time; and supplied or fed a new centripetalism there which righted things in the next half-cycle.
In China, a dawn twilight of half a cycle, sixty-five years, from the fall of Chow to the Revival of Literature under the second Han, preceded the glorious age of the Western Hans. In Rome, the literary currents were flowing for about a half-cycle before the accession of Augustus: that half-cycle formed a dawn-twilight preceding the glories of the Augustan Age.
The reign was too short, even if Caligula had troubled his head with the provinces, for him to spoil the good work done in them during the preceding half-cycle. He did not so trouble his head; being too busy murdering the pillars of Roman society.
The period from 220 to 265 about a half-cycle, you will note, from 196 and the beginning of the Chien-An time, or the end of the main Han Cycle, is known as that of the San Koue or Three Kingdoms: its annals read like Froissart, they say; gay with raidings, excursions, and alarms. It was the riot of life disorganized in the corpse, when organized life had gone.
You will notice that the Han day lasted the full thirteen decades before twilight came; the Roman, but six decades and a half. We ought to understand just how far this second Roman half-cycle was an age of decline: just how much darkneww suffused the twilight it was. We talk of representative government; as if any government were ever really anything else.
But note this: Domitian was killed, and Nerva came to the throne, and Rome had leave to breathe freely again, in five years before the half-cycle of shadows should have ended: the two years of Nerva, and the first three of Trajan, we may call borrowed by the dawning manvantara from the dusk of the pralaya that was passing.
Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia. The Athenian first half-cycle sixty-five years from the inception of the hegemony ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase.
Word Of The Day