villain under the encroachment of other people’s egotism.  The sight of too many trophies will convert a friend into a covert enemy, who, without being treacherous, will nevertheless betray a great cause by his jealousy of its great supporter.  But the latter will not always become a traitor to suit the expectations of an envious friendship.  And your own judgment of men and prophecy of events, if based entirely upon selfish calculation, will entirely fail.

Nations differ also, in spite of the similar things that they do in analogous circumstances.  Both Rome and England will not have too ambitious neighbors.  They hate a preponderating power, and find out some way to get rid of the threat to their national egotism.  The Romans exterminate the Veians and Carthaginians; they want no colonizing or commercial rivals.  If England rules the sea, and uses its advantage to create markets where it can buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest rates, we can understand its inexpensive sympathy for the people who can manufacture little and therefore have to import a great deal, who are thus the natural, disinterested lovers of free trade.  It is very easy to see why England turns red in the Crimea with the effort to lift up that bag of rags called Turkey, to set it on the overland route to India; one decayed nation makes a very good buffer to break the shock of natural competition in the using up of another.  It was the constant policy of Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from the peculator.  She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and half-effete races.  On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes.  Is this difference merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the trousers?  But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread into papilloe over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived.  Should we expect this from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet before Copenhagen in 1801, without even the formality of a declaration of war, on the suspicion that the Dane preferred to sympathize with France?  What moral clamor could have made the selfish exigency of that act appear more damaging than a coalition of all the fleets of Europe?  Yet plantation fanaticism did not prevent the great act from which we augured English hatred of a slaveholders’ rebellion.  Probably the lining membrane of a pocket may have intermitted accesses of induration:  we must consult circumstances, if we would know what to expect.  An extraordinary vintage or a great fruit year will follow a long series of scant or average crops; but we can count upon the average.