Doubtless, In Consequence Of The Great Revolutions Which Human Society Undergoes, The Public Fortune, The Common Patrimony Of Civilization, Is Found Differently Divided Among The Nations Of The Old And The New World:

But by degrees the equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other part of our planet as a calamity to Europe.

The independence of the colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce tends to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. It is the nature of civilization to go forward without any tendency to decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress from east to west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing against this axiom. A clear light loses none of its brilliancy by being diffused over a wider space. Intellectual cultivation, that fertile source of national wealth, advances by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its movement is not a migration: and though it may seem to be such in the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt, Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the civilization of our ancestors.

The barbarism of nations is the consequence of oppression exercised by internal despotism or foreign conquest; and it is always accompanied by progressive impoverishment, by a diminution of the public fortune. Free and powerful institutions, adapted to the interests of all, remove these dangers; and the growing civilization of the world, the competition of labour and of trade, are not the ruin of states whose welfare flows from a natural source.

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