Thus only in a land where rulers, being evil themselves, feel all goodness to be their instinctive foe, and themselves therefore entertain an instinctive hostility to it, where they punish but never reward, where not to be noticed by them is the highest ambition of those under their yoke, in no other land could a proverb like the following, _Do no good, and thou shalt find no evil_, have ever come to the birth. How settled a conviction that wrong, and not right, was the lord paramount of the world must have grown up in men’s spirits, before such a word as this, (I know of no sadder one,) could have found utterance from their lips.[64] [Sidenote: Irish proverb.] I have taken a wide circuit of nations; with the proverb of a people nearer home I must bring this branch of the subject to an end. It is one, and a very characteristic one, which the poet Spenser, who long dwelt in Ireland, records as current in his time among the Irish; in which were contained their offer of service to their native chiefs, with a statement of what they expected in return: _Spend me, and defend me_. Their leaders in all times have taken them only too well at their word in respect of the first half of the proverb, and have not failed prodigally to _spend_ them; although their undertakings to _defend_ have issued exactly as must ever issue all promises on the part of others to defend men from those evils, from which none can really protect them but themselves. * * * * * [Sidenote: German proverbs.]