to be eager to promote the happiness of our, fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly fyftem, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy. There have been men of the greatest public fpirit, who have shown themselves in other refpects not very fenfible to the feelings of humanity. And on the contrary, there have been men of the greatest humanity, who feem to have been entirely devoid of public fpirit. Every man may find in the circle of his acquaintance inftances both of the one kind and the other. Who had ever less humanity, or more public fpirit, than the celebrated legislator of Muscovy? The focial and wellnatured James the Firft of Great Britain seems, on the contrary, to have had scarce any paffion, either for the glory or the intereft of his country. Would you awaken the industry of the man who feems almost dead to ambition, it will often be to no purpose to describe to him the happiness of the rich and the great; to tell him that they are generally fheltered from the fun

and the rain, that they are seldom hungry, that they are feldom cold, and that they are rarely exposed to wearinefs, or to want of any kind. The most eloquent exhortation of this kind will have little effect upon him. If you would hope to fucceed, you must describe to him the conveniency and arrangement of the different apartments in their palaces; you must explain to him the propriety of their equipages, and point out to him the number, the order, and the different offices of all their attendants. If any thing is capable of making impreffion upon him, this will. Yet all these things tend only to keep off the fun and the rain, to fave them from hunger and cold, from want and wearinefs. In the fame manner, if you would implant public virtue in the breaft of him who feems heedlefs of the intereft of his country, it will often be to no purpose to tell him, what fuperior advantages the fubjects of a well-governed ftate enjoy; that they are better lodged, that they are better clothed, that they are better fed. These confiderations will commonly make no great impreffion. You

will be more likely to perfuade, if you describe the great fyftem of public police which procures these advantages, if you explain the connexions and dependencies of its several parts, their mutual fubordination to one another, and their general fubferviency to the happiness of the society; if you show how this fyftem might be introduced into his own country, what it is that hinders it from taking place there at present, how thofe obftructions might be removed, and all the feveral wheels of the machine of government be made to move with more harmony and fmoothness, without grating upon one another, or mutually retarding one another's motions. It is fcarce poffible that a man fhould liften to a difcourse of this kind, and not feel himself animated to fome degree of public fpirit. He will, at least for the moment, feel fome defire to remove thofe obftructions, and to put into motion fo beautiful and fo orderly a machine. Nothing tends fo much to promote public fpirit as the ftudy of politics, of the feveral fyftems of civil government, their advantages and disadvantages,

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tages, of the conftitution of our own country, its fituation, and intereft with regard to foreign nations, its commerce, its defence, the disadvantages it labours under, the dangers to which it may be expofed, how to remove the one, and how to guard against the other. Upon this account political difquifitions, if juft, and reasonable, and practicable, are of all the works of fpeculation the most useful. Even the weakest and the worft of them are not altogether without their utility. They serve at leaft to animate the public paffions of men, and rouse them to feek out the means of promoting the happiness of the society.

CHA P. II.

Of the beauty which the appearance of Utility beflows upon the characters and actions of men; and bow far the perception of this beauty may be regarded as one of the original principles of approbation.

HE characters of men, as well as the

TH

contrivances of art, or the inftitutions of civil government, may be fitted either to promote or to disturb the happiness both of the individual and of the fociety. The prudent, the equitable, the active, refolute, and fober character promises prosperity and fatisfaction, both to the perfon himself and to every one connected with him. The rash, the infolent, the flothful, effeminate, and voluptuous, on the contrary, forebodes ruin to the individual, and misfortune to all who have any thing to do with him. The first turn of mind has at least all the beauty which can belong to the moft perfect machine that was ever invented for promoting the most agreeable purpose: and the fecond, all the deformity of the moft awkward and

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