set up both their liberty and their country to sale to the best bidder. The republick,[270] which was the common prey to both, was thus rent to pieces between the contending parties. As an universal selfishness is the genuine effect of universal luxury, so the natural effect of selfishness is to break through every tie, both divine and human, and to stick at no kind of excesses in the pursuit of wealth, its favourite object. Thus the effects of selfishness will naturally appear in irreligion,[271] breach of faith, perjury, a contempt of all the social duties, extortion, frauds in our dealings, pride, cruelty, universal venality and corruption. From selfishness arises that vicious ambition (if I may be allowed the term) which Sallust rightly defines, “the lust of domination.”[272] Ambition as a passion, precedes avarice; for the seeds of ambition seem almost to be innate. The desire of pre-eminence, the fondness for being distinguished above the rest of our fellow-creatures, attends us from the cradle to the grave. Though as it takes its complexion, so it receives its denomination from the different objects it pursues, which in all are but the different means of attaining the same end. But the lust of domination, here mentioned by Sallust, though generally confounded with ambition, is in reality a different passion, and is, strictly speaking, only a different mode of selfishness. For the chief end which we propose, by the lust of domination, is to draw every thing to centre in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion. I confess it may be alleged, that self-love and selfishness both arise from the general law of self-preservation, and are but different modes of the same principle. I acknowledge, that if we examine strictly all those heroick instances of love, friendship, or patriotism, which seem to be carried to the most exalted degree of disinterestedness, we shall probably find the principle of self-love lurking at the bottom of many of them. But, if we rightly define these two principles, we shall find an essential difference between our ideas of self-love, and selfishness. Self-love, within its due bounds, is the practice of the great duty of self-preservation, regulated by that law which the great author of our being has given for that very end. Self-love therefore is not only compatible with the most rigid practice of the social duties, but is in fact a great motive and incentive to the practice of all moral virtue. Whereas selfishness, by reducing every thing to the single point of private interest, a point which it never loses sight of, banishes all the social virtues, and is the first spring of action, which impels to all those disorders, which are so fatal to mixed government in particular, and to society in general. From this poisonous source Sallust deduces all those evils,[273] which spread the pestilence of corruption over the whole face of the republick, and changed the mildest