No one, surely, can doubt that many of the
pernicious measures above enumerated, and many others as bad, would be
for the immediate interest of the general body of unskilled labourers.
It is quite possible that they would be for the selfish interest of
the whole existing generation of the class. The relaxation of industry
and activity, and diminished encouragement to saving which would be
their ultimate consequence, might perhaps be little felt by the
class of unskilled labourers in the space of a single lifetime.
Some of the most fatal changes in human affairs have been, as to
their more manifest immediate effects, beneficial. The establishment
of the despotism of the Caesars was a great benefit to the entire
generation in which it took place. It put a stop to civil war,
abated a vast amount of malversation and tyranny by praetors and
proconsuls; it fostered many of the graces of life, and intellectual
cultivation in all departments not political; it produced monuments of
literary genius dazzling to the imaginations of shallow readers of
history, who do not reflect that the men to whom the despotism of
Augustus (as well as of Lorenzo de' Medici and of Louis XIV.) owes its
brilliancy, were all formed in the generation preceding. The
accumulated riches, and the mental energy and activity, produced by
centuries of freedom, remained for the benefit of the first generation
of slaves.
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