again those weapons, which will not be more
mischievous at home than in the Colonies. That they may not fly from the
increase of rent, I know not whether the general good does not require
that the landlords be, for a time, restrained in their demands, and kept
quiet by pensions proportionate to their loss.

To hinder insurrection, by driving away the people, and to govern
peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great
profundity of politicks. To soften the obdurate, to convince the
mistaken, to mollify the resentful, are worthy of a statesman; but it
affords a legislator little self-applause to consider, that where there
was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.

It has been a question often agitated without solution, why those
northern regions are now so thinly peopled, which formerly overwhelmed
with their armies the Roman empire. The question supposes what I believe
is not true, that they had once more inhabitants than they could
maintain, and overflowed only because they were full.

This is to estimate the manners of all countries and ages by our own.
Migration, while the state of life was unsettled, and there was little
communication of intelligence between distant places, was among the
wilder nations of Europe, capricious and casual. An adventurous
projector heard of a fertile coast unoccupied, and led out a colony; a
chief of renown for bravery, called the young men together, and led them
out to try what fortune would present. When Caesar was in Gaul, he found
the Helvetians preparing to go they knew not whither, and put a stop to
their motions. They settled again in their own country, where they were
so far from wanting room, that they had accumulated three years provision
for their march.

The religion of the North was military; if they could not find enemies,
it was their duty to make them: they travelled in quest of danger, and
willingly took the chance of Empire or Death. If their troops were
numerous, the countries from which they were collected are of vast
extent, and without much exuberance of people great armies may be raised
where every man is a soldier. But their true numbers were never known.
Those who were conquered by them are their historians, and shame may have
excited them to say, that they were overwhelmed with multitudes. To
count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess; and when
numbers are guessed they are always magnified.

T