e the changes of their political situation,
they must preserve the manners of Europe; and we may reflect with some
pleasure, that the English language will probably be diffused ever an
immense and populous continent.]

III. Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue, fortify the
strength and courage of Barbarians. In every age they have oppressed the
polite and peaceful nations of China, India, and Persia, who neglected,
and still neglect, to counterbalance these natural powers by the
resources of military art. The warlike states of antiquity, Greece,
Macedonia, and Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their
bodies, disciplined their courage, multiplied their forces by regular
evolutions, and converted the iron, which they possessed, into strong
and serviceable weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with
their laws and manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and his
successors armed and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude
valor of the Barbarian mercenaries. The military art has been changed
by the invention of gunpowder; which enables man to command the two
most powerful agents of nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry,
mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the service of war; and
the adverse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of
attack and of defence. Historians may indignantly observe, that the
preparations of a siege would found and maintain a flourishing colony;
[9000] yet we cannot be displeased, that the subversion of a city should be
a work of cost and difficulty; or that an industrious people should be
protected by those arts, which survive and supply the decay of military
virtue. Cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier
against the Tartar horse; and Europe is secure from any future
irruptions of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must
cease to be barbarous. Their gradual advances in the science of war
would always be accompanied, as we may learn from the example of Russia,
with a proportionable improvement in the arts of peace and civil policy;
and they themselves must deserve a place among the polished nations whom
they subdue.

[Footnote 9000: On avoit fait venir (for the siege of Turin) 140 pieces
de canon; et il est a remarquer que chaque gros canon monte revient
a environ ecus: il y avoit 100,000 boulets; 106,000 cartouches d'une
facon, et 300,000 d'une autre; 21,000 bombes; 27,700 grenades, 15,000