It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention,
however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it
safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously
true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and
durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out.
Through the joint influence of these two principles, all free
communities have both been more exempt from social injustice and
crime, and have attained more brilliant prosperity, than any others,
or than they themselves after they lost their freedom. Contrast the
free states of the world, while their freedom lasted, with the
cotemporary subjects of monarchical or oligarchical despotism: the
Greek cities with the Persian satrapies; the Italian republics and the
free towns of Flanders and Germany, with the feudal monarchies of
Europe; Switzerland, Holland, and England, with Austria or
anterevolutionary France. Their superior prosperity was too obvious
ever to have been gainsaid: while their superiority in good government
and social relations is proved by the prosperity, and is manifest
besides in every page of history. If we compare, not one age with
another, but the different governments which co-existed in the same
age, no amount of disorder which exaggeration itself can pretend to
have existed amidst the publicity of the free states can be compared
for a moment with the contemptuous trampling upon the mass of the
people which pervaded the whole life of the monarchical countries,
or the disgusting individual tyranny which was of more than daily
occurrence under the systems of plunder which they called fiscal
arrangements, and in the secrecy of their frightful courts of justice.
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