by law, and cut one another to pieces in pitched battles, for quarrels of as trifling a nature.  The sects of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians quite distracted these very serious heads for a time.  But I fancy they will hardly ever be so silly again, they seeming to be grown wiser at their own expense; and I do not perceive the least inclination in them to murder one another merely about syllogisms, as some zealots among them once did.

But here follows a more essential difference between Rome and England, which gives the advantage entirely to the latter—­viz., that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty.  The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil; where the nobles are great without insolence, though there are no vassals; and where the people share in the Government without confusion.

The House of Lords and that of the Commons divide the legislative power under the king, but the Romans had no such balance.  The patricians and plebeians in Rome were perpetually at variance, and there was no intermediate power to reconcile them.  The Roman senate, who were so unjustly, so criminally proud as not to suffer the plebeians to share with them in anything, could find no other artifice to keep the latter out of the administration than by employing them in foreign wars.  They considered the plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behoved them to let loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their masters.  Thus the greatest defect in the Government of the Romans raised them to be conquerors.  By being unhappy at home, they triumphed over and possessed themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them to slavery.

The Government of England will never rise to so exalted a pitch of glory, nor will its end be so fatal.  The English are not fired with the splendid folly of making conquests, but would only prevent their neighbours from conquering.  They are not only jealous of their own liberty, but even of that of other nations.  The English were exasperated against Louis XIV. for no other reason but because he was ambitious, and declared war against him merely out of levity, not from any interested motives.

The English have doubtless purchased their liberties at a very high price, and waded through seas of blood to drown the idol of arbitrary power.  Other nations have been involved in as great calamities, and have shed as much blood; but then the blood they spilt in defence of their liberties only enslaved them the more.