have become
a property and hereditary, they have excited less dissensions, and the
people have suffered fewer convulsions; finally, if the despots, jealous
and mysterious, have interdicted all knowledge of their administration,
all concurrence in the management of public affairs, the passions
of men, drawn aside from politics, have fixed upon the arts, and the
sciences of nature; and the sphere of ideas in every direction has been
enlarged; man, devoted to abstract studies, has better understood his
place in the system of nature, and his relations in society; principles
have been better discussed, final causes better explained, knowledge
more extended, individuals better instructed, manners more social, and
life more happy. The species at large, especially in certain countries,
has gained considerably; and this amelioration cannot but increase in
future, because its two principal obstacles, those even which, till
then, had rendered it slow and sometimes retrograde,--the difficulty of
transmitting ideas and of communicating them rapidly,--have been at last
removed.

* Read the history of the wars of Rome and Carthage, of
Sparta and Messina, of Athens and Syracuse, of the Hebrews
and the Phoenicians: yet these are the nations of which
antiquity boasts as being most polished!

Indeed, among the ancients, each canton, each city, being isolated
from all others by the difference of its language, the consequence was
favorable to ignorance and anarchy. There was no communication of ideas,
no participation of discoveries, no harmony of interests or of wills, no
unity of action or design; besides, the only means of transmitting and
of propagating ideas being that of speech, fugitive and limited,
and that of writing, tedious of execution, expensive and scarce, the
consequence was a hindrance of present instruction, loss of experience
from one generation to another, instability, retrogression of knowledge,
and a perpetuity of confusion and childhood.

But in the modern world, especially in Europe, great nations having
allied themselves in language, and established vast communities of
opinions, the minds of men are assimilated, and their affections
extended; there is a sympathy of opinion and a unity of action; then
that gift of heavenly Genius, the holy art of printing, having furnished
the means of communicating in an instant the same idea to millions of
men, and of fixing it in a durable manner, beyond the