Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/44

38 vent in foreign wars and intetine inurrections the people acquire ome power in the tumult, which obliges their rulers to glos over their oppreion with a hew of right. Thus, as wars, agriculture, commerce, and literature, expand the mind, depots are compelled, to make covert corruption hold fat the power which was formerly natched by open force. And this baneful lurking gangrene is mot quickly pread by luxury and upertition, the ure dregs of ambition. The indolent puppet of a court firt becomes a luxurious monter, or fatidious enualit, and then makes the contagion which his unnatural tate pread, the intrument of tyranny.

It is the petiferous purple which renders the progres of civilization a cure, and warps the undertanding, till men of enibility doubt whether the expanion of intellect produces a greater portion of happines or miery. But the nature of the poion points out the antidote; and had Roueau mounted one tep higher in his invetigation, or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmophere, which he almot didained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the etablihment of true civilization, intead of taking his ferocious flight back to the night of enual ignorance. .&ensp;