estrangement and division which made them all enemies one to the other.
If the powers of government have been more concentrated, there has been
more system and harmony in their exercise. If wars have become more
extensive in the mass, they are less bloody in detail. If men have gone
to battle with less personality, less energy, their struggles have been
less sanguinary and less ferocious; they have been less free, but less
turbulent; more effeminate, but more pacific. Despotism itself has
rendered them some service; for if governments have been more absolute,
they have been more quiet and less tempestuous. If thrones have become
a property and hereditary, they have excited less dissensions, and the
people have suffered fewer convulsions; finally, if the despots, jealous
and mysterious, have interdicted all knowledge of their administration,
all concurrence in the management of public affairs, the passions
of men, drawn aside from politics, have fixed upon the arts, and the
sciences of nature; and the sphere of ideas in every direction has been
enlarged; man, devoted to abstract studies, has better understood his
place in the system of nature, and his relations in society; principles
have been better discussed, final causes better explained, knowledge
more extended, individuals better instructed, manners more social, and
life more happy. The species at large, especially in certain countries,
has gained considerably; and this amelioration cannot but increase in
future, because its two principal obstacles, those even which, till
then, had rendered it slow and sometimes retrograde,--the difficulty of
transmitting ideas and of communicating them rapidly,--have been at last
removed.

* Read the history of the wars of Rome and Carthage, of
Sparta and Messina, of Athens and Syracuse, of the Hebrews
and the Phoenicians: yet these are the nations of which
antiquity boasts as being most polished!