And then, after coupling morals and well-being, he announces the true rule: “An individual who shall do well will succeed, and who shall do ill will fail: _it is the same with nations_.”[328] This is just and lofty. In such a spirit he cherished plans of political reconstruction in foreign nations, especially in Italy. The old Italian cry was his: “The Barbarians must be driven from Italy”; and he contemplated “a republic or eternal association of the Italian powers, as there was a German, a Dutch, an Helvetic,” and he called this “the greatest affair that had been treated in Europe for a long time.” The entry of Italy was to be closed to the Emperor; and he adds: “For ourselves what a happy privation, if we are excluded forever from the necessity of sending thither our armies to triumph, but to perish!”[329] The intelligence that saw Italy so clearly saw France also, and her exigencies, marking out “a national senate composed equally of all the orders of the state, and which, on questions of peace and war, would hold the kings in check by the necessity of obtaining supplies”; also saw the approaching decay of Turkey, and wished to make Greece flourishing once more, to acquire possession of the holy places, to overcome the barbarians of Northern Africa by a union of Christian powers, which, “once well united in a kind of Christian Republic, according to the project of Henry the Fourth detailed by the Abbé Saint-Pierre, would have something better to do than fighting to destroy each other as they now do.”[330] Naturally this singular precocious intelligence reached across the Atlantic, and here he became one of our prophets:-- “Another great event to arrive upon the round earth is this. The English have in North America domains great, strong, rich, well regulated. There are in New England a parliament, governors, troops, white inhabitants in abundance, riches, and, what is worse, a marine. “I say that some fine morning these dominions may separate from England, rise and erect themselves into an independent republic. “What will happen then? Do people think of this? A country civilized by the arts of Europe, in a condition to communicate with it by the present perfection of its marine, and which will thus appropriate our arts in proportion to their improvement,--patience! such a country in several centuries will make great progress in population and in refinement; such a country in a short time will render itself master of America, and especially of the gold-mines.” Then, dwelling on the extension of commercial freedom and the improvement of the means of communication, he exclaims, with lyrical outburst:--