In republics, persons elevated from the mass of the community, by the
suffrages of their fellow-citizens, to stations of great pre-eminence
and power, may find compensations for betraying their trust, which, to
any but minds animated and guided by superior virtue, may appear to
exceed the proportion of interest they have in the common stock, and to
overbalance the obligations of duty. Hence it is that history furnishes
us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign
corruption in republican governments. How much this contributed to the
ruin of the ancient commonwealths has been already delineated. It is
well known that the deputies of the United Provinces have, in various
instances, been purchased by the emissaries of the neighboring kingdoms.
The Earl of Chesterfield (if my memory serves me right), in a letter to
his court, intimates that his success in an important negotiation must
depend on his obtaining a major's commission for one of those deputies.
And in Sweden the parties were alternately bought by France and England
in so barefaced and notorious a manner that it excited universal disgust
in the nation, and was a principal cause that the most limited monarch
in Europe, in a single day, without tumult, violence, or opposition,
became one of the most absolute and uncontrolled.
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