asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before
Salamis and Platea confirmed the superiority of European free
states over Oriental despotism. So, AEgos-Potamos, which finally
crushed the maritime power of Athens, seems to me inferior in
interest to the defeat before Syracuse, where Athens received her
first fatal check, and after which she only struggled to retard
her downfall. I think similarly of Zama with respect to
Carthage, as compared with the Metaurus: and, on the same
principle, the subsequent great battles of the Revolutionary war
appear to me inferior in their importance to Valmy, which first
determined the military character and career of the French
Revolution.

I am aware that a little activity of imagination, and a slight
exercise of metaphysical ingenuity, may amuse us, by showing how
the chain of circumstances is so linked together, that the
smallest skirmish, or the slightest occurrence of any kind, that
ever occurred, may be said to have been essential, in its actual
termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I
speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important
agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully
infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand,
the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like
the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country,
recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary
phenomena, which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when,
in this work, I speak of probabilities, I speak of human
probabilities only. When I speak of Cause and Effect, I speak of
those general laws only, by which we perceive the sequence of
human affairs to be usually regulated; and in which we recognise