equal, or greater, measures of wealth, should operate to the same effect.

On the contrary, when wealth is accumulated only in the hands of the miser,
and runs to waste from those of the prodigal; when heirs of family find
themselves straitened and poor in the midst of affluence; when the cravings
of luxury silence even the voice of party and faction; when the hopes of
meriting the rewards of compliance, or the fear of losing what is held at
discretion, keep men in a state of suspense and anxiety; when fortune, in
short, instead of being considered as the instrument of a vigorous spirit,
becomes the idol of a covetous or a profuse, of a rapacious or a timorous
mind, the foundation on which freedom was built may serve to support a
tyranny; and what, in one age, raised the pretensions, and fostered the
confidence of the subject, may, in another, incline him to servility, and
furnish the price to be paid for his prostitutions. Even those who, in a
vigorous age, gave the example of wealth, in the hands of the people,
becoming an occasion of freedom, may, in times of degeneracy, verify
likewise the maxim of Tacitus, that the admiration of riches leads to
despotical government. [Footnote: Est apud illos et opibus honos;
eoque unus imperitat, nullis jam exceptionibus, non precario jure
parendi. Nec arms ut apud ceteros Germanos in promiscuo, sed clausa
sub custode et quidem servo, &c. TACITUS _de Mor. Ger._ c.44.]

Men who have tasted of freedom, and who have felt their personal rights,
are not easily taught to bear with encroachments on either, and cannot,
without some preparation, come to submit to oppression. They may receive
this unhappy preparation under different forms of government, from
different hands, and arrive at the same end by different ways. They
follow one direction in republics, another in monarchies and in
mixed governments. But wherever the state has, by means that do not
preserve the virtue of the subject, effectually guarded his safety;