Agreeably to this description, the vexations of tyranny have overcome, in
many parts of the East, the desire of settlement. The inhabitants of a
village quit their habitations, and infest the public ways; those of the
valleys fly to the mountains, and, equipt for flight, or possessed of a
strong hold, subsist by depredation, and by the war they make on their
former masters.

These disorders conspire with the impositions of government to render the
remaining settlements still less secure: but while devastation and ruin
appear on every side, mankind are forced anew upon those confederacies,
acquire again that personal confidence and vigour, that social attachment,
that use of arms, which, in former times, rendered a small tribe the seed
of a great nation; and which may again enable the emancipated slave to
begin the career of civil and commercial arts. When human nature appears in
the utmost state of corruption, it has actually begun to reform.

In this manner, the scenes of human life have been frequently shifted.
Security and presumption forfeit the advantages of prosperity; resolution
and conduct retrieve the ills of adversity; and mankind while they have
nothing on which to rely but their virtue, are prepared to gain every
advantage; and while they confide most in their good fortune, are most
exposed to feel its reverse. We are apt to draw these observations into
rule; and when we are no longer willing to act for our country, we plead,
in excuse of our own weakness or folly, a supposed fatality in human
affairs.

The institutions of men, if not calculated for the preservation of virtue,
are, indeed, likely to have an end as well as a beginning: but so long as
they are effectual to this purpose, they have at all times an equal
principle of life, which nothing but an external force can suppress; no