Perhaps the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty empire, and explain the probable causes of our actual security.” The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilised society and we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome. The balance of power will continue to fluctuate, and the prosperity of our own or the neighbouring kingdoms may be alternately exalted or depressed but these partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies.
It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native country but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation. This awful revolution may be usefully applied to the instruction of the present age. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians… The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.
“The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind.
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