tinize and invalidate it. Since they admit of
no mental progress, what serves as a bond to-day will be equally
serviceable to-morrow; so that apparently their dissolution cannot come
from themselves. It is true, a barbarous people, possessed of a
beautiful country, may be relaxed in luxury and effeminacy; but such
degeneracy has no obvious tendency to weaken their faith in the objects
in which their political unity consists, though it may render them
defenceless against external attacks. And here indeed lies their real
peril at all times; they are ever vulnerable from without. Thus Sparta,
formed deliberately on a barbarian pattern, remained faithful to it,
without change, without decay, while its intellectual rival was the
victim of successive revolutions. At length its power was broken
externally by the Theban Epaminondas; and by the restoration of
Messenia, the insurrection of the Laconians, and the emancipation of the
Helots. Agesilaus, at the time of its fall, was as good a Spartan as any
of his predecessors. Again, the ancient Empire of the Huns in Asia is
said to have lasted 1,500 years; at length its wanton tyranny was put an
end to by the Chinese King plunging into the Tartar desert, and thus
breaking their power. Thrace, again, a barbarous country, lasted many
centuries, with kings of great vigour, with much external prosperity,
and then succumbed, not to internal revolution, but to the permanent
ascendancy of Rome. Similar too is the instance of Pontus, and again of
Numidia and Mauritania; they may have had great or accomplished
sovereigns, but they have no history, except in the wars of their
conquerors. Great leaders are necessary for the prosperity, as great
enemies for the destruction, of barbarians; they thrive, as they come to
nought, by means of agents external to themselves. So again Malek Shah
died, and his empire fell to pieces. Hence, too, the unexpected and
utter catastrophes which befall barbarous people, analogous to a violent
death, which I have alluded to in speaking of the sudden rise and fall
of Tartar dynasties; for no one can anticipate results, which, instead
of being the slow evolution of political principles, proceed from the
accident of external quarrels and of the relative condition of rival
powers.

6.

Far otherwise is the history of those states, in which the intellect,
not prescription, is recognized as the ultimate authority, and where the
course of time is necessarily accomp