ities; but it is impossible to conceive that they embrace
justice as a practical principle who act fairly with their fellow
highwaymen, and at the same time plunder or kill the next honest man
they meet.' (Vol. i, p. 37.) In India, the difference between the
army of a prince and the gang of a robber was, in the general
estimation of the people, only in _degree_--they were both driving an
_imperial trade_, a 'padshahi kam'. Both took the auspices, and set
out on their expedition after the Dasahra, when the autumn crops were
ripening; and both thought the Deity propitiated as soon as they
found the omens favourable;[15] one attacked palaces and capitals,
the other villages and merchants' storerooms. The members of the army
of the prince thought as little of the justice or injustice of his
cause as those of the gang of the robber; the people of his capital
hailed the return of the victorious prince who had contributed so
much to their wealth, to his booty, and to their self-love by his
victory. The village community received back the robber and his gang
with the same feelings: by their skill and daring they had come back
loaded with wealth, which they were always disposed to spend
liberally with their neighbours. There was no more of truth in the
prince and his army in their relations with the princes and people of
neighbouring principalities, than in the robber and his gang in their
relations with the people robbed. The prince flatters the self-love
of his army and his people; the robber flatters that of his gang and
his village--the question is only in degree; the persons whose self-
love is flattered are blind to the injustice and cruelty of the
attack--the prince is the idol of a people, the robber the idol of a
gang. Was ever robber more atrocious in his attacks upon a merchant
or a village than Louis XIV of France in his attacks upon the
Palatine and Palatinate of the Rhine? How many thousand similar
instances might be quoted of princes idolized by their people for
deeds equally atrocious in their relations with other people? What
nation or sovereign ever found fault with their ambassadors for
telling lies to the kings, courts, and people of other countries?[16]

Rome, during the whole period of her history, was a mere den of
execrable thieves, whose feelings were systematically brutalized by
the most revolting spectacles, that they might have none of those
sympathies with suffering humanity, none of those 'compuncti