IXfyl. * on scieniijic government. ^x^ 



' ■ AU political institutions, till lately, have arisen 

 feoin cJiance, necei'sity, or imitation ; and none have 

 been formed, few even improved, on the radical 

 principles of man's nature ; because all legislators 

 have either made laws on the spur of the occasion, 

 or laid plans for the government of men, such as they 

 ought to be, but such as they are not, and cannot be 

 rendered, but in the lapse of agf-s. 



It is, therefore, the proper object of him who 

 searches into antiquity, to contemplate the history of 

 the world as a politician, to discover the propensi- 

 ties of social man, his natural habits, and consequent 

 customs, which are too strong for laws alone to 

 obviate, or to reform ; and those errors in legisla- 

 tion, which have succefsively brought every nation to 

 ks fall, by gradations so uniformly marked in the 

 page of history, that they invite the friends of huma- 

 nity to attempt, by unfolding the causes, to point out 

 the cure of political disease. 



To perform this taflc would fill a volume; and I 

 mean only to lay before your readers a fev>' observa- 

 tions, tending to flievv, that a new sera of liberty and 

 legislation has appeared, which promises to re ier 

 mankind, in geneial, wiser and better, and coiise- 

 quenlly happier than they have been in past ages. 



The general and individual wealth of nations, crea- 

 ted by the improvement of agriculture, trade, and 

 manufactures, and the almost universal difsemination 

 of knowledge among the lower ranks of mankind, by 

 education and tlic art of printing ; the C4»ntinual inter- 

 course created by navigation and posts, and the mul- 

 tiplied organization of men into societies, for toai- 



VOL. vii, R R i 



