Last Prophecy of Rome

‘If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West… The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.’

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-88

‘…in the course of human events it becomes necessary for…people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…’

From the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence, 1776