Livy informs us, that this very measure of Agathocles set the precedent which Scipio followed with so much success in the second Punick war, when that able general, by a similar descent in Africa, compelled the Carthaginians to recall Hannibal out of Italy to their immediate assistance, and reduced them to that impotent state, from which they never afterwards were able to recover.[209] How successfully the French played the same game upon us, when they obliged us to recall our forces out of Flanders to crush the rebellion, which they had spirited up with that very view, is a fact too recent to need any mention of particulars. How lately did they drive us to the expense, and I may say the ignominy, of fetching over a large body of foreign mercenaries for the immediate defence of this nation, which plumes herself so much upon her power and bravery? How greatly did they cramp all our measures, how much did they confine all our military operations to our own immediate self-defence, and prevent us from sending sufficient succours to our colonies by the perpetual alarm of an invasion? Though we may in part truly ascribe the ruin of Carthage to the two above-mentioned errors in their policy, yet the cause which was productive of the greatest evils, and consequently the more immediate object of our attention at this dangerous juncture, was party disunion; that bane of every free state, from which our own country has equal reason to apprehend the same direful effects, as the republicks of Greece, Rome, and Carthage experienced formerly. By all the lights, which we receive from history, the state of Carthage was divided into two opposite factions; the Hannonian and the Barcan, so denominated from the respective leaders, who were heads of the two most powerful families in Carthage. The Hannonian family seems to have made the greatest figure in the senate; the Barcan in the field. Both were strongly actuated by ambition, but ambition of a different kind. The Barcan family seems to have had no other object in view but the glory of their country, and were always ready to give up their private animosities, and even their passion for military glory to the publick good. The Hannonian family acted from quite opposite principles, constantly aiming at one point; the supporting themselves in power, and that only. Ever jealous of the glory acquired by the Barcan family, they perpetually thwarted every measure proposed from that quarter, and were equally ready to sacrifice the honour and real interest of their country to that selfish view. In short, the one family seems to have produced a race of heroes, the other of ambitious statesmen.