in possession of a profession to which he would have recurred, if turned out of office, and that he might have been wealthy had he not sacrificed all private considetions. (2) We must also remember that the people knew that the embarrassments of Pitt were not caused by prodigality, or dissoluteness in gaming or otherwise. When the king of France offered two rich abbeys to Richelieu, having belonged to one of his enemies, he said, though I own he was then rich, and in his position at that time could not well avoid becoming so: "My ambition aims higher, at a place in universal history." There is hardly a history of the first French revolution, in which mention is not made, that after the arrest of Robespierre, a few pieces of money only were found in his bureau, nor was he possessed of other property. Even his crimes, great as they are, we feel might have been increased, had he added avarice to them as some of his companions in guilt actually did. How edifying are those accounts of the ancients, Epaminondas, Philopœmen, the Ælians and many others, upon whom the offer of wealth or their own poverty had no sort of influence; how cheering is the life of Pym also in this respect. He died without any property, having sacrificed all his time and energy to his country, and parliament had to pay the small amount of debt which he left. Compare these examples of freedom from sordidness, with those favorites, of whom history mentions so many, who used the ascendency they acquired over weak-minded monarchs, to accumulate riches, however illegally, unrighteously or cruelly gotten, and to make every one of their kindred participate in their plunder.

The rule then for a public man, or one who feels a calling to become such, in a free country in modern times, seems to me this:

Keep yourself independent, which includes first, as a matter of course, a total discarding of that silly and littleminded desire to rival your rich neighbor in his way of living, and secondly, that you should be possessed of the means of maintaining yourself, be this by the possession of a moderate property or a profession or trade (Spinoza was a glass-grinder); and that these means may be easily acquired (for otherwise you would not feel independent), reduce your wants to the lowest degree, compatible with a continued communion with your fellow-beings, by way of intercourse with your neighbors, and by way of books with the distant and dead, on the one hand, and a decorous but modest maintenance of your family and the sound education of your children on the other.

(1) This does not include a fair contribution on the part of the fellow-citizens, after a public man has sacrificed, in times of danger, his private means for the public good.

(2) Wraxhall gives several remarkable anecdotes of this trait in Pitt, in his Posthumous Memoirs of His own Times.

XXXIII. The desire of wealth being natural, and especially so in modern times, we must most scrupulously guard ourselves against its excess, in its various forms and manifestations, meanness, covetousness, dishonesty and whatever other evils or vices arise from it. In every light in which we may view the subject it urgently demands our undivided attention.

All nations have abhorred peculation, by which we may understand in its widest sense, the abuse as well as the purloining of public property, and which may consist in using, for a limited period, public funds or property, for private ends, in purloining and robbing them, and in the abuse of official information for private gain. I am not aware that the latter has ever been comprehended within the term peculation, though it is punishable according to several codes. But philosophically speaking it is certainly a species of peculation; for it belongs to the same class of dishonest actions, springing from the same immoral source with the crime of peculation properly so called. (1)

Excessive ambition, excessive attachment to kinsmen or friends, nepotism, excessive party attachment, excessive shame to confess wrong, excessive love of action, all have become at times injurious to the state, and may most seriously disturb its essential prosperity; but none of all these passions can be compared in their baneful effect, to public dishonesty. All the former may still coexist with some redeeming qualities; we may imagine even conspirators against their country, impelled by criminal ambition, not without horror indeed, yet without actual loathing, but we cannot so a band of peculators. Peculation presupposes meanness and total degradation, which is not absolutely necessary with the ambitious conspirator. A man who commits knowingly wrong for money, who sells himself, has been considered the most abject of evil doers, and may be supposed ready to commit all the evil acts of the others besides his own crime. So soon as covetousness becomes general in a civilised nation; so soon as dishonesty is a general crime; so soon as public places are considered, by common consent, as fair opportunities to enrich their holders, willing to wink at each other's embezzlements; so soon as parties consider themselves by their success entitled to the spoils of the public-so soon there is a deadly cancer in the

vitals of that society, and hardly any thing but severe changes and revolutions can save it. Justice will be sold, bribes become common, public opinion flee, veracity and consistency will be disregarded, patriotism be derided, every memory of greatness or nobleness be disgraced, oppression in every degree become general, and the moral tone of society at large, which must always remain the first spring from which public prosperity flows, will vanish. The history of the period of Charles II. furnishes a melancholy example; bribed judges, lists of members of parliament paid by the French ambassador, and, to crown all, a king in the traitorous pay of the greatest enemy of his own country. (2) The history of France before and during the first revolution; (3) the history of Italy; the history of Spain, of Portugal, all prove the same. Peculator after peculator was sent from the mother country to the colonies of the peninsula, and the consequence even now is the low moral tone and endless misery in the republics of South America. No history, however, is perhaps so impressive on this subject as that of Rome from the second Punic war, and especially under the emperors, and of Athens. (4) Individuals are exposed to follies or criminal imprudence, if they do not take heed of past misfortunes brought on by faults of their own; nations do the same if they neglect their own history, or that of other states, which exhibit a warning with awful solemnity such as is contained in Roman history. (5)

(1) It is certainly one of the worst because most unprincipled kinds of peculation, if government favor private persons with information, or early knowledge of messages, &c., because they belong to the same party. The most criminal abuse of power, however, in this province is, if a minister, or other officer spreads false news to raise or depress certain funds for private specula

tion.

(2) Among other works, the Diary of Samuel Pepys, London, 1825, deserves to be read on this account.

(3) Montesquieu dwells upon the universal dishonesty and covetousness as one of the greatest evils of France. The memoirs of all the different reigns show this vice in a frightful degree. Nothing strikes the reader of the memoirs ascribed to Sully so much, besides the glorious relation between two so great men, as Henry and Sully, as the rank poison of universal rapacity through the whole leading class of the nation, from the prince of the blood to the counsellor of parliament, or farmer of the taxes.

(4) "The desire of gain destroyed all sense of equity." Boeckh, Public Economy of Athens, London, 1838, vol. ii, p. 129. Athens suffered fearfully in consequence of the lavish distribution of public money by the popular leaders, partly obtained by excessive fines and confiscations, by bribes and exactions from foreigners. As above, vol. ii, p. 114, and many other places.

(5) Sismondi, History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia; but, before all, Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is a melancholy fact indeed that Gibbon is little read now; general observation would lead one to the conclusion; it is a fact likewise confirmed by the booksellers. They sell but few copies in the United States, compared to what they did but fifteen years ago; how it is in England I do not know. This is much to be regretted. So mighty an empire ought not to have crumbled into dust with so many crimes and such unspeakable suffering for centuries, without our heeding it. In the decline of Rome we see a large and most remarkable state, in a state of maceration. The physiologist derives some of his most important knowledge of the sound body from the diseased; the deranged functions and pathologic anatomy aid him in arriving at a true knowledge of their sound state; the philosopher of the mind derives valuable instruction from observing the insane; the anatomist learns the organization of the living body from the dead: it is similarly so in politics. The disturbed functions of bodies politic teach us how sound ones operate. Nations passed by are our subjects; they lie still under