The ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Chinese empires, and in modern times the sudden collapse of the French, Russian, German and Austrian empires warn us, by example, of what happens to nations, in spite of all their external splendor and apparent manifestations of greatness, when the private individual becomes restricted in thought and act by narrow, mean specialization, mean formalism, monotony of lines of action due to a legalized mesh of fibrinous tissue in a hypertrophied, cartilagenous, ossified structure of organized, and classified, governmental officialdom.
Source: wiktionary