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. Both 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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