ir laws and government; and their
respective external powers have been in proportion to the number of
persons interested, and their degree of interest in the public welfare.

On the other hand, the multiplication of men, by complicating their
relations, having rendered the precise limitation of their rights
difficult, the perpetual play of the passions having produced incidents
not foreseen--their conventions having been vicious, inadequate, or
nugatory--in fine, the authors of the laws having sometimes mistaken,
sometimes disguised their objects; and their ministers, instead of
restraining the cupidity of others, having given themselves up to
their own; all these causes have introduced disorder and trouble into
societies; and the viciousness of laws and the injustice of governments,
flowing from cupidity and ignorance, have become the causes of the
misfortunes of nations, and the subversion of states.

CHAPTER X.

GENERAL CAUSES OF THE PROSPERITY OF ANCIENT STATES.

Such, O man who seekest wisdom, such have been the causes of revolution
in the ancient states of which thou contemplatest the ruins! To whatever
spot I direct my view, to whatever period my thoughts recur, the same
principles of growth or destruction, of rise or fall, present themselves
to my mind. Wherever a people is powerful, or an empire prosperous,
there the conventional laws are conformable with the laws of nature--the
government there procures for its citizens a free use of their
faculties, equal security for their persons and property. If, on the
contrary, an empire goes to ruin, or dissolves, it is because its laws
have been vicious, or imperfect, or trodden under foot by a corrupt
government. If the laws and government, at first wise and just, become
afterwards depraved, it is because the alternation of good and evil is
inherent to the heart of man, to a change in his propensities, to his
progress in knowledge, to a combination of circumstances and events; as
is proved by the history of the species.

In the infancy of nations, when men yet lived in the forest, subject to
the same wants, endowed with the same faculties, all were nearly equal
in strength; and that equality was a circumstance highly advantageous
in the composition of society: as every individual, thus feeling himself
sufficiently independent of every other, no one was the slave, none
thought of being the master of another. Man, then a novice, knew neither
servitude nor tyr