Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/126

society and politics of Money, for mere Money's sake, then the close of our circle of civilisation is nearly reached, and the old story of Tyre and Sidon and Babylon will be re-told again for us with the same fatal conclusion to which Volney, in his Ruins of Empires impressively calls attention, in the following passage: "Cupidity, the daughter and companion of ignorance, has produced all the mischiefs that have desolated the globe. Ignorance and the love of accumulation, these are the two sources of all the plagues that infest the life of man. They have inspired him with false ideas of his happiness, and prompted him to misconstrue and infringe the laws of nature, as they related to the connection between him and exterior objects. Through them his conduct has been injurious to his own existence, and he has thus violated the duty he owes to himself; they have fortified his heart against compassion, and his mind against the dictates of justice, and he has thus violated the duty he owes to others. By ignorant and inordinate desire, man has armed himself against man, family against family, tribe against tribe, and the earth is converted into a bloody theatre of discord and robbery. They have sown the seeds of secret war in the bosom of every state, divided the citizens from each other, and the same society is constituted of oppressors and oppressed, of masters and slaves. They have taught the heads of nations, with audacious insolence, to turn the arms of society against itself, and to build upon mercenary avidity the fabric of political despotism, or they have a more hypocritical and deep-laid project, that imposes, as the dictate of heaven, lying