concatenated links, that connect with their causes all the effects he
witnesses, without losing sight of any one of its rings,--if he could
unravel the ends of those insensible threads that give impulse to the
thoughts, decision to the will, direction to the passions of those men
who are called mighty, according to their actions, he would find, they
are true atoms which Nature employs to move the moral world; that it is
the unexpected but necessary function of these indiscernible particles
of matter, it is their aggregation, their combination, their proportion,
their fermentation, which modifying the individual by degrees, in
despite of himself, frequently without his own knowledge, make him
think, will, and act, in a determinate, but necessary mode. If, then,
the will and the actions of this individual have an influence over a
great number of other men, here is the moral world in a state of the
greatest combustion, and those consequences ensue which man contemplates
with fearful wonder. Too much acrimony in the bile of a fanatic--blood
too much inflamed in the heart of a conqueror--a painful indigestion in
the stomach of a monarch--a whim that passes in the mind of a woman--are
sometimes causes sufficient to bring on war--to send millions of men to
the slaughter--to root out an entire people--to overthrow walls--to
reduce cities into ashes--to plunge nations into slavery--to put a whole
people into mourning--to breed famine in a land--to engender pestilence
--to propagate calamity--to extend misery--to spread desolation far and
wide upon the surface of our globe, through a long series of ages.

The dominant passion of an individual of the human species, when it
disposes of the passions of many others, arrives at combining their
will, at uniting their efforts, and thus decides the condition of man.
It is after this manner that an ambitious, crafty, and voluptuous Arab,
gave to his countrymen an impulse of which the effect was the
subjugation and desolation of vast countries in Asia, in Africa, and in