If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort
of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they
would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is
left in their avarice. Confounded by the complication of distempered
passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and
perplexed,--to others inexplicable, to themselves uncertain. They find,
on all sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order
of things; but in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and
appears without any limit.
When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a
distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the
whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now
appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious:
a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy; a tendency in all that
is done to lower along with individuals all the dignity and importance
of the state? Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who,
whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth,
sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose
peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at
the destruction of their country. They were men of great civil and great
military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age.
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