ions often turn out, if not simply nugatory, nothing short of
destructive; and though there is a great notion just now that the
British Constitution admits of being fitted upon every people under
heaven, from the Blacks to the Italians, I do not know what has occurred
to give plausibility to the anticipation. England herself once attempted
the costume of republicanism, but she found that monarchy was part of
her political essence.

(2.) Still less can the possibility be admitted of a civilized polity
really relapsing into barbarism; though a state of things may be
superinduced, which in many of its features may be thought to resemble
it. In truth, I have not yet traced out the ultimate result of those
internal revolutions which I have assigned as the incidental but certain
evils, in the long run, attendant on civilization. That result is
various: sometimes the over-civilized and degenerate people is swept
from the face of the earth, as the Roman populations in Africa by the
Vandals; sometimes it is reduced to servitude, as the Egyptians by the
Ptolemies, or the Greeks by the Turks; sometimes it is absorbed or
included in new political combinations, as the northern Italians by the
Lombards and Franks; sometimes it remains unmolested on its own
territory, and lives by the momentum, or the repute, or the habit, or
the tradition of its former civilization. This last of course is the
only case which bears upon the question I am considering; and I grant
that a state of things does then ensue, which in some of its phenomena
is like barbarism; China is an example in point. No one can deny its
civilization; its diligent care of the soil, its cultivation of silk and
of the tea-tree, its populousness, its canals, its literature, its court
ceremonial, its refinement of manners, its power of persevering so
loyally in its old institutions through so many ages, abundantly
vindicate it from the reproach of barbarism. But at the same time there
are tokens of degeneracy, which are all the stronger for being also
tokens, still more striking than those I have hitherto mentioned, of its
high civilization in times past. It has had for ages the knowledge of
the more recent discoveries and institutions of the West, which have
done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the
magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national
character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of
an effete