ders a people weak at home, and accessible to bribery,
corruption, and force from abroad. When the Grecian
states knew no other tools than the axe and the saw,
the Grecians were a great, a free, and a happy people.
The kings of Greece devoted their lives to the service
of their country, and her senators knew no other
superiority over their fellow-citizens than a glorious
pre-eminence in danger and virtue. They exhibited
to the world a noble spectacle,--a number of inde-
pendent states united by a similarity of language,
sentiment, manners, common interest, and common
consent, in one grand mutual league of protection.
And, thus united, long might they have continued the
cherishers of arts and sciences, the protectors of the
oppressed, the scourge of tyrants, and the safe asylum
of liberty. But when foreign gold, and still more per-
nicious foreign luxury, had crept among them, they
sapped the vitals of their virtue. The virtues of their
ancestors were only found in their writings. Envy
and suspicion, the vices of little minds, possessed them.
The various states engendered jealousies of each other;
and, more unfortunately, growing jealous of their
great federal council, the Amphictyons, they forgot
that their common safety had existed, and would exist,
in giving them an honourable extensive prerogative.
The common good was lost in the pursuit of private
interest; and that people who, by uniting, might have
stood against the world in arms, by dividing, crum-
bled into ruin;--their name is now only known in the
page of the historian, and what they once were is all