Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/487

 employ the powers of others for our advantage. He who cannot make what he wants, will, however, easily procure it, if he can pay an artist. He who suffers any remediable inconvenience, needs not to suffer it long, if he can reward the labour of those who are able to remove it. Riches will make an ignorant man prudent by another's wisdom, and a weak man vigorous by another's strength. It can, therefore, be no wonder, that riches are generally desired; and that almost every man is busy, through his whole life, in gaining, or in keeping them, for himself, or his posterity.

As there is no desire so extensive, or so continual in its exertions, that possesses so many minds, or operates with such restless activity; there is none that deviates into greater irregularity, or more frequently corrupts the heart of man, than the wish to enlarge possession and accumulate wealth.

In a discourse, intended for popular instruction, it would be of little utility to mention the ambition of kings, and display the cruelty of conquerors. To slaughter thousands in a day, to spread desolation over wide and fertile regions, and to carry rapine and destruction indiscriminately from one country to another, can be the crime only of those few who have sceptres in their hands; and, even among them, the wantonness of war is not very common in our days. But it is a sufficient evidence of the power of interest, that such acts should ever have been perpetrated; that there could ever be any man, willing to augment his wealth, or extend his power, by slaughter and devastation; or able to persuade himself, that he might purchase advantages, which he could enjoy only in imagination, at the expense of the lives of thousands of his subjects, as well as his adversaries; of adversaries that never had injured or offended him, and of subjects whom it was his duty and his engagement to preserve and to protect.

Nor is it necessary to mention crimes, which are commonly found amongst the lowest of mankind, the