In societies formed on such foundations, when time and labor had
developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful,
but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it
fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the
citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families,
unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name
of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every
thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of
encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in
its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations.

Sometimes, opposing itself to all social compact, or breaking that
which already existed, it committed the inhabitants of a country to the
tumultuous shock of all their discords; and states thus dissolved, and
reduced to the condition of anarchy, were tormented by the passions of
all their members.

Sometimes a nation, jealous of its liberty, having appointed agents to
administer its government, these agents appropriated the powers of which
they had only the guardianship: they employed the public treasures in
corrupting elections, gaining partisans, in dividing the people among
themselves. By these means, from being temporary they became perpetual;
from elective, hereditary; and the state, agitated by the intrigues of
the ambitious, by largesses from the rich and factious, by the venality
of the poor and idle, by the influence of orators, by the boldness of
the wicked, and the weakness of the virtuous, was convulsed with all the
inconveniences of democracy.

The chiefs of some countries, equal in strength and mutually fearing
each other, formed impious pacts, nefarious associations; and,