“It is true, toils, hunger, thirst, shoals, storms, sooner or later destroy these insatiable traders, who traverse the seas to bring you these precious superfluities. But with how many advantages are these petty inconveniences repaid? The face of Europe is entirely new! even to your constitutions all is changed. Thousands of quintals of spices, circulate in your blood, carry fire into your inmost nerves, and give you a new sort of Being. Neither your health, nor your diseases are like those of your fore-fathers. Their robust constitution, simplicity of manners, their native virtues, are they comparable to the advantages you enjoy? That sensibility of the organs, that delicacy of mind and body, those universal lights, those vices of all kinds.... What! will it be said, are vices also to be reckoned among the actual felicities of Europe? Yes, without doubt: Is it not daily proved, that virtue heretofore might be useful to the prudent economy of your ancestors, but that, for enlightened citizens, who no longer walk by the old rules, vice is absolutely necessary, or rather changes its nature and becomes virtue. “Another advantage that you owe to the depth of your policy and extensiveness of your trade is, that perpetual occasions offer to show your courage, and to practice your military virtues. “When formerly your countries were under that vast dominion, which swallowed up all the rest, they sunk into indolence; you had only short wars and long intervals of peace, every thing languished. But since, out of the wrecks of that unwieldy empire, a hundred petty states have been formed, every thing has revived. The Europeans have incessantly quarrelled and fought for little spots of land; the grand art of heroism is returned, the art of sacking provinces and shedding blood: And that balance of power so much talked of, is at last established, which puts all Europe in arms at the motion of the least of its parts, and by means of which, a single spark is sufficient to set the whole earth in a flame. “Let us not regret those times so productive of warriors, when country heroes, each at the head of two or three hundred vassals, continually harrassed one another. The seeds of dissention, which were grown scarce in your climates, have been sought in the farthest parts of the earth; and from the bosom of the two Indias, commerce has brought fresh seeds of enmity, discord, and war. “These fertile sources are not exhausted; there still remain countries to be discovered. O ye indefatigable nations! is your courage abated? What! should you confine yourselves to your late progresses, as if there remained no unknown lands? Will you never go and hoist your standards, and build forts, directly under the Poles? Rouse yourselves, there are still left riches to plunder, countries to waste, blood to spill.