Imaginary Conversation. 7 SCIPIO. Enumerate them, Panetius, with your wonted clearness. PANETIUS. We are fond, O my friends ! of likening power and great- ness to the luminaries of heaven ; and we think ourselves quite moderate when we compare the agitations of elevated souls to whatever is highest and strongest on the earth, liable alike to shocks and sufferings, and able alike to survive and overcome them. And truly thus to reason, as if all things around and above us sympathized, is good both for heart and intellect. I have little or nothing of the poetical in my character ; and yet from reading over and considering these similitudes, I am fain to look upon nations with somewhat of the same feeling ; and, dropping from the mountains and disentangling myself from the woods and forests, to fancy I see in states what I have seen in cornfields. The green blades rise up vigorously in an inclement season, and the wind itself makes them shine against the sun. There is room enough for all of them ; none wounds another by collision or weakens by overtopping it ; but, rising and bending simultaneously, they seem equally and mutually supported. No sooner do the ears of corn upon them lie close together in their full maturity, than a slight inundation is enough to cast them down, or a faint blast of wind to shed and scatter them. In Carthage we have seen the powerful families, however dis- cordant among themselves, unite against the popular ; and it was only when their lives and families were at stake that the people cooperated with the senate. A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely ; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand. What people will en- dure the supremacy of those, uneducated and presumptuous, from whom they buy their mats and faggots, and who receive their money for the most ordinary and vile utensils ? If no conqueror enslaves them from abroad, they would, under such disgrace, welcome as their deliverer, and acknowledge as their master, the citizen most distinguished for his military achievements. The rich men who were crucified in the weltering wilderness beneath us, would not have employed such criminal means of growing richer, had they never been
