Besides the degradation and listlessness occasioned in the lower ranks, by an unequal distribution of property, the most agreeable, and the strongest bond of society is thereby broken. The bond that --- {112} This is less the case in England than in any other country. {113} It is strange how possibility, which is the mother of hope, acts upon, and controuls, the passions. Envy is generally directed to those who are but a little raised above us. They are reckoned to be madmen who envy kings, or fall in love with princesses, and, in fact, they are such, unless when they belong to the same rank themselves. Love, for example, which is not a voluntary passion, or under the controul of reason, ought, according to the chances of things, sometimes to make a sensible and wise man become enamoured of a princess, but that never happens. It would appear, that, in order to become the object of desire, there must be a hope founded on a reasonable expectation of obtaining the object. This can be but very small in the lower classes, when they look at the overgrown rich, and have no intermediate rank to envy or emulate. -=- [end of page #132] consists, in the attachment of the inferior classes, to those immediately above them. Where the distance is great, there is but little connection, and that connection is merely founded upon conveniency, not on a similarity of feeling, or an occasional interchange of good actions, or mutual services. By this means, the whole society becomes, as it were, disjointed, and if the chain is not entirely broken, it has at least lost that strength and pliability that is necessary, either for the raising a nation to greatness, or supporting it after it has risen to a superior degree of rank or power. Amongst the causes of the decline of wealthy nations, this then is one. The great lose sight of the origin of their wealth, and cease to consider, that all wealth originates in labour, and that, therefore, the industrious and productive classes are the sinews of riches and power. The French nation, to which we have had occasion to allude already, was in this situation before the revolution. Rome was so likewise before its fall. We are not, however, to expect to find this as a principal cause in the fall of all nations; many of them fell from exterior and not interior causes. Venice, Genoa, and all the places that flourished in the middle ages, fell from other causes. Whatever their internal energy might have been, their fate could not have been altered, nor their fall prevented. The case is different with nations of which the extent is sufficiently great to protect them against the attacks of their enemies; and where the local situation is such as to secure them from a change taking place in the channels of commerce, a cause of decline which is not to be resisted by any power inherent in a nation itself.