what they may suffer from foreign invasions, it is one object, in every
prosperous society, to increase its force, and to extend its limits. In
proportion as this object is gained, security increases. They who possess
the interior districts, remote from the frontier, are unused to alarms from
abroad. They who are placed on the extremities, remote from the seats of
government, are unused to hear of political interests; and the public
becomes an object perhaps too extensive for the conceptions of either. They
enjoy the protection of its laws, or of its armies; and they boast of its
splendour, and its power; but the glowing sentiments of public affection,
which, in small states, mingle with the tenderness of the parent and the
lover, of the friend and the companion, merely by having their object
enlarged, lose great part of their force.

The manners of rude nations require to be reformed. Their foreign quarrels,
and domestic dissentions, are the operations of extreme and sanguinary
passions. A state of greater tranquillity hath many happy effects. But if
nations pursue the plan of enlargement and pacification, till their members
can no longer apprehend the common ties of society, nor be engaged by
affection in the cause of their country, they must err on the opposite
side, and by leaving too little to agitate the spirits of men, bring on
ages of languor, if not of decay.

The members of a community may, in this manner, like the inhabitants of a
conquered province, be made to lose the sense of every connection, but that
of kindred or neighbourhood; and have no common affairs to transact, but
those of trade: connections, indeed, or transactions, in which probity and
friendship may still take place; but in which the national spirit, whose
ebbs and flows we are now considering, cannot be exerted.

What we observe, however, on the tendency of enlargement to loosen the