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they, indeed, pay more than their share of taxes in almost every country; {112} but they cannot directly, even by election, participate in the government of the country.

If any number of persons engross the whole of the lands of a nation, then the labourers that live on those lands must be in a degraded situation; they then become less sound and less important members of the state than they would otherwise be.

Necessity does not act with that favourable impulse on people, where property is very unequally divided, that it does where the gradation from the state of poverty to that of riches is more regular.

As the action of the body is brought on by the effect produced on the mind; and as there is no hope of obtaining wealth where it appears very unequally divided, so also there is no exertion where there is no hope. {113}

Where there is no regular gradation of rank and division of property, emulation, which is the spur to action, when absolute necessity ceases to operate, is entirely destroyed; thus the lower classes become degraded and discouraged, as is universally found to be the case in nations that have passed their meridian; the contrary being as regularly and constantly the case with rising nations.

Besides the degradation and listlessness occasioned in the lower ranks, by an unequal distribution of property, the most agreeable, and the strongest bond of society is thereby broken.  The bond that

—–­ {112} This is less the case in England than in any other country.

{113} It is strange how possibility, which is the mother of hope, acts upon, and controuls, the passions.  Envy is generally directed to those who are but a little raised above us.  They are reckoned to be madmen who envy kings, or fall in love with princesses, and, in fact, they are such, unless when they belong to the same rank themselves.

Love, for example, which is not a voluntary passion, or under the controul of reason, ought, according to the chances of things, sometimes to make a sensible and wise man become enamoured of a princess, but that never happens.  It would appear, that, in order to become the object of desire, there must be a hope founded on a reasonable expectation of obtaining the object.  This can be but very small in the lower classes, when they look at the overgrown rich, and have no intermediate rank to envy or emulate. -=-

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consists, in the attachment of the inferior classes, to those immediately above them.  Where the distance is great, there is but little connection, and that connection is merely founded upon conveniency, not on a similarity of feeling, or an occasional interchange of good actions, or mutual services.  By this means, the whole society becomes, as it were, disjointed, and if the chain is not entirely broken, it has at least lost that strength and pliability that is necessary, either for the raising a nation to greatness, or supporting it after it has risen to a superior degree of rank or power.