e cause of their country with an energy unknown
in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or
voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they
wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to
them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local
and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in
small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may be forced
into existence for a short time by peculiar circumstances, they cannot
be general or permanent. It is impossible that any man should feel for
a fortress on a remote frontier as he feels for his own house; that he
should grieve for a defeat in which ten thousand people whom he never
saw have fallen as he grieves for a defeat which has half unpeopled the
street in which he lives; that he should leave his home for a military
expedition in order to preserve the balance of power, as cheerfully as
he would leave it to repel invaders who had begun to burn all the corn
fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should
have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the
Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an
exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural,
and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies
no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that, where it has
existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers
whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a
character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of
all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians
troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented
by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the
choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to
assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in
their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made liberty a plea
for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little
commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures
directed against everything which makes liberty valuable, for measures
which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and
discouraged th