Uncontrolled power, in the hands of an incensed, imperious, and rapacious conqueror, is an engine of dreadful execution, and woe be to that country over which it can be exercised.
Paine warns of the catastrophic consequences for any nation subjected to the absolute power of an angry and greedy conqueror.
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With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin, desolation, and misery.
The object, in all such preliminary proceedings, is to find out what the general sense of a nation is, and to be governed by it.
As to what are called national religions, we may, with as much propriety, talk of national Gods.
By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe.