sufficient power for its protection, then the only way to endeavour to
share it was by imitation; but if the wealth was found unprotected,
then conquest or violence was always considered as the most ready
way of obtaining possession.

The wandering Arabs, who are the only nations that profess robbery at
the present day, (by land,) follow still the same maxim with regard to
those whose wealth they mean to enjoy. If too powerful to be
compelled by force to give up what they have got, they traffic and
barter with the merchants of a caravan; but if they find themselves
able to take, they never give themselves the trouble to adopt the
legitimate but less expeditious method of plunder and robbery =sic=.
[end of page #175]

As it has been found that wealth operates, by degrees, in destroying
the bravery of a people, after a certain time, so it happens that, in the
common course of things, a moment arrives when it is considered
safe, by some one power or other, to attack the wealthy nation, and
partake of its riches; thus it was that the cities of Tyre and of Babylon
were attacked by Alexander; and thus it was that his successors, in
their turn, were attacked and conquered by the Romans; and, again,
the Romans themselves, by the barbarous nations of the north.

Besides those great revolutions, of which the consequences were
permanent, there have been endless and innumerable struggles for the
possession of wealth, amongst different nations; but the real and
leading causes are so uniform, and so evident, that there is not a
shadow of a doubt left on that subject.

Mr. Burke had good reason to say that the external causes were much