There is, nevertheless, a side of truth in the constitutionalist view, which Mr. Carlyle, I think, overlooks. A bad political constitution does produce poverty and weakness: but only in as far as it tends to produce moral evil; to make men bad. That it can help to do. It can put a premium on vice, on falsehood, on peculation, on laziness, on ignorance; and thus tempt the mass to moral degradation, from the premier to the slave. Russia has been, for two centuries now but too patent a proof of the truth of this assertion. But even in this case, the moral element is the most important, and just the one which is overlooked. To have good laws, M. Guizot is apt to forget, you must first have good men to make them; and second, you must have good men to carry them out, after they are made. Bad men can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions. Look at the working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III and Anne, and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who work them are false and venal. Look, on the other hand, at the Roman Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see how well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are working it. Bad laws, I say, will work tolerably under good men, if fitted to the existing circumstances by men of the world, as all Roman laws were. If they had not been such, how was the Roman Empire, at least in its first years, a blessing to the safety, prosperity, and wealth of every country it enslaved? But when defective Roman laws began to be worked by bad men, and that for 200 years, then indeed came times of evil. Let us take, then, Salvian's own account of the cause of Roman decay. He, an eye-witness, imputes it all to the morals of Roman citizens. They were, according to him, of the very worst. To the general dissoluteness he attributes, in plain words, the success of the Frank and Gothic invaders. And the facts which he gives, and which there is no reason to doubt, are quite enough to prove him in the right. Every great man's house, he says, was a sink of profligacy. The women slaves were at the mercy of their master; and the slaves copied his morals among themselves. It is an ugly picture: but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little, that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries, wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest form, to control the passions of arbitrary power.