st be satisfied that other
sources of faction, combining parties among the inhabitants of different
countries into one connection, are opened, and that from these sources
are likely to arise effects full as important as those which had
formerly arisen from the jarring interests of the religious sects. The
intention of the several actors in the change in France is not a matter
of doubt. It is very openly professed.

In the modern world, before this time, there has been no instance of
this spirit of general political faction, separated from religion,
pervading several countries, and forming a principle of union between
the partisans in each. But the thing is not less in human nature. The
ancient world has furnished a strong and striking instance of such a
ground for faction, full as powerful and full as mischievous as our
spirit of religions system had ever been, exciting in all the states of
Greece (European and Asiatic) the most violent animosities and the most
cruel and bloody persecutions and proscriptions. These ancient factions
in each commonwealth of Greece connected themselves with those of the
same description in some other states; and secret cabals and public
alliances were carried on and made, not upon a conformity of general
political interests, but for the support and aggrandizement of the two
leading states which headed the aristocratic and democratic factions.
For as, in later times, the king of Spain was at the head of a Catholic,
and the king of Sweden of a Protestant interest, (France, though
Catholic, acting subordinately to the latter,) in the like manner the
Lacedemonians were everywhere at the head of the aristocratic interests,
and the Athenians of the democratic. The two leading powers kept alive a
constant cabal and conspiracy in every state, and the political dogmas
concerning the constitution of a republic were the great instruments by
which these leading states chose to aggrandize themselves. Their choice
was not unwise; because the interest in opinions, (merely as opinions,
and without any experimental reference to their effects,) when once they
take strong hold of the mind, become the most operative of all
interests, and indeed very often supersede every other.

I might further exemplify the possibility of a political sentiment
running through various states, and combining factions in them, from the
history of the Middle Ages in the Guelfs and Ghibellines. These were
political factions origi