Page:Julian Niemcewicz - Notes of my Captivity in Russia.djvu/116

ing them to the greatest weal of society, seem to confirm every day the old adage, “the public property belongs to nobody.” Thus, as we see those republicans happy and in easy domestic circumstances, so we find them very indifferent to everything connected with public establishments, which, generally, in their country are conducted as dame fortune pleases. The cause of this appears to me to lie, first, in the difficulty of making the bulk of a republican community understand that order and obedience are not at all incompatible with a wise liberty; and, in the second place, in the want of public spirit, and in the selfishness with which the modern republicans enjoy their liberty. That patriotism and national pride which animated the Greeks and Romans, scarcely exist now-a-days. The Greeks and Romans, in the most glorious period of their history, however sober and modest in their private life, spared neither trouble nor expense in anything that could add to the public usefulness and splendour: the mere ruins of their buildings astonish us