Wealth, acquired by conquest, was incompatible with that austere virtue and independent principle which form the basis of republican prosperity.

As all public employments were obtained by the favour of the people; and as all wealth and power were obtained by the channels of public employment; bribery and corruption, which cannot take place in a poor republic, became very common in this wealthy one; so that this republican government, so constituted, lost all those advantages it possessed while it was poor.

Had the murderers of Julius Caesar, either understood the real corruption of the commonwealth, or foreseen that a new master would rise up, they would never have destroyed that admirable man.  Had Rome not been ready to receive a master, Julius Caesar, with all his ambition, would never have grasped at the crown.

In nations that obtain wealth by commerce, manufactures, or any other means than by conquests, the corruption of the state is not naturally so great.  The wealth originates in the people, and not in the state; and, besides that they are more difficult to purchase, there is less means of doing so, and less inducement; neither can they, being the sources of wealth themselves, become so idle and corrupted. {39}

—–­ {39} The wild and ungovernable direction that the French revolution took originated chiefly in the creation of assignats, which not only exempted the people from taxes at first, but had the effect of producing an artificial and temporary degree of wealth, that [end of page #41] enabled vast numbers, either in the pay of others, or at their own expense, to make cabals and politics their whole study.  Rome never was in such a licentious state, because, before the citizens got into that situation, the military power was established. -=-

In the ancient nations that fell one after another, we have seen the young and vigorous subdue the more wealthy and luxurious; or we have seen superior art and skill get the better of valour and ignorance; but, in the fall of the Roman empire, the art and skill were all on the side of those who fell, and the vigour of those who conquered was not so powerful an agent as the very low and degraded state into which the masters of the world had themselves fallen.

It is by no means consistent with the plan of this work, nor is it any way necessary for the inquiry, to enter into the particular details of the degraded and miserable state to which the Romans were reduced; insomuch, that those who emigrated previously to its fall, and settled amongst barbarous nations, found themselves more happy than they had been, being freed from taxation and a variety of oppressions.

Though the Roman people are, of all others, those whose rise and fall are the most distinctly known; yet, in some circumstances, their case does not apply to nations in general.  Had they cultivated commerce and the arts, with the same success that they pursued conquest, they must have become wealthy at a much earlier period, and they would not have found themselves in possession of an almost boundless empire, composed of different nations, subdued by force, and requiring force to be preserved.