Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/73

Rh their engagements has cost them. What immense credit at home! What preponderance abroad! On the contrary, look into what an abyss of misfortunes nations have often been precipitated by the ambition and the perfidy of their chiefs. Every time that a great power intoxicated by the love of conquest aspires to universal domination the sentiment of independence produces among the menaced nations a coalition of which it becomes almost always the victim. Similarly in the midst of the variable causes which extend or restrain the divers states, the natural limits acting as constant causes ought to end by prevailing. It is important then to the stability as well as to the happiness of empires not to extend them beyond those limits into which they are led again without cessation by the action of the causes; just as the waters of the seas raised by violent tempests fall again into their basins by the force of gravity. It is again a result of the calculus of probabilities confirmed by numerous and melancholy experiences. History treated from the point of view of the influence of constant causes would unite to the interest of curiosity that of offering to man most useful lessons. Sometimes we attribute the inevitable results of these causes to the accidental circumstances which have produced their action. It is, for example, against the nature of things that one people should ever be governed by another when a vast sea or a great distance separates them. It may be affirmed that in the long run this constant cause, joining itself without ceasing to the variable causes which act in the same way and which the course of time develops, will end by finding them sufficiently