To the administration of such ministers, which may justly be termed the grand æra of corruption, we owe that fatal system of bribery, which has so greatly affected the morals of the electors in almost every borough in the kingdom. To that too we may justly attribute the present contempt, and disregard of the sacred obligation of an oath, which is the strongest bond of society, and the best security and support of civil government. I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for that rapid, and unexampled degeneracy of the Romans, which brought on the total subversion of that mighty republick. The cause of this sudden, and violent change of the Roman manners, has been just hinted at by the sagacious Montesquieu, but, to my great surprise, has not been duly attended to by any one historian I have yet met with.[329] I have showed too, how the same cause has been working the same effects in our own nation, as it invariably will in every country where those fatally destructive principles are admitted. As the real end of all history is instruction, I have held up a just portrait of the Roman manners, in the times immediately preceding the loss of their liberty, to the inspection of my countrymen, that they may guard in time against those calamities which will be the inevitable consequence of the like degeneracy. The unpromising aspect of our affairs, at the time of the sudden and unexpected alliance between the houses of Bourbon and Austria, gave the first rise to these reflections. But as the interests and situation of this kingdom, with respect to France, are so greatly analogous to those of Carthage with respect to Rome, I shall proceed to compare the different manners, policy, and military conduct of those two rival nations. By thus comparing the different policy of these warlike people, whose views and interests were as diametrically opposite, and as irreconcilable as those of Great Britain and France, we may learn the superior advantages which each enjoyed, and the different disadvantages arising from their different policy, which each people laboured under, during their long and inveterate contests. The result, which I most sincerely wish from this inquiry, is, that we may avoid those egregious blunders on the side of the Romans, which reduced them to the very brink of ruin, and those more capital defects on the part of the Carthaginians, which terminated in the utter destruction of their very being as a people. [303] Dionys. Halicarn. lib. 2. 65. [304] Mores majorum non paulatim ut antea, sed torrentis modo precipitati. Sallust. Fragment. p. 139. [305] Nulla umquam res publica sanctior, nec bonis exemplis dititor fuit. Liv. in Præfat. [306] Dionys. Halicarn. Lib. 2. p. 61, 62. [307] —Tamen nec numero Hispanos, nec robore Gallos, nec calliditate Pœnos, nec artibus Græcos.