Although the principles to which it gave rise did not operate with a perfect regularity and constancy, they never wholly ceased to operate.  Few wars were made, and few treaties were entered into, in which they did not come in for some part.  They gave a color, a character, and direction to all the politics of Europe.

[Sidenote:  New system of politics.]

These principles of internal as well as external division and coalition are but just now extinguished.  But they who will examine into the true character and genius of some late events must be satisfied that other sources of faction, combining parties among the inhabitants of different countries into one connection, are opened, and that from these sources are likely to arise effects full as important as those which had formerly arisen from the jarring interests of the religious sects.  The intention of the several actors in the change in France is not a matter of doubt.  It is very openly professed.

In the modern world, before this time, there has been no instance of this spirit of general political faction, separated from religion, pervading several countries, and forming a principle of union between the partisans in each.  But the thing is not less in human nature.  The ancient world has furnished a strong and striking instance of such a ground for faction, full as powerful and full as mischievous as our spirit of religions system had ever been, exciting in all the states of Greece (European and Asiatic) the most violent animosities and the most cruel and bloody persecutions and proscriptions.  These ancient factions in each commonwealth of Greece connected themselves with those of the same description in some other states; and secret cabals and public alliances were carried on and made, not upon a conformity of general political interests, but for the support and aggrandizement of the two leading states which headed the aristocratic and democratic factions.  For as, in later times, the king of Spain was at the head of a Catholic, and the king of Sweden of a Protestant interest, (France, though Catholic, acting subordinately to the latter,) in the like manner the Lacedemonians were everywhere at the head of the aristocratic interests, and the Athenians of the democratic.  The two leading powers kept alive a constant cabal and conspiracy in every state, and the political dogmas concerning the constitution of a republic were the great instruments by which these leading states chose to aggrandize themselves.  Their choice was not unwise; because the interest in opinions, (merely as opinions, and without any experimental reference to their effects,) when once they take strong hold of the mind, become the most operative of all interests, and indeed very often supersede every other.