Magistrates and collectors of revenue are now
no longer acquainted with their districts, bishops with their dioceses,
or curates with their parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men
bear a strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which
Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. In better and
wiser days (whatever course they took with foreign nations) they were
careful to make the elements of a methodical subordination and
settlement to be coeval, and even to lay the foundations of discipline
in the military.[122] But when all the good arts had fallen into ruin,
they proceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men, and
with as little judgment, and as little care for those things which make
a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as well as almost every
instance, your new commonwealth is born and bred and fed in those
corruptions which mark degenerated and worn-out republics. Your child
comes into the world with the symptoms of death; the _facies
Hippocratica_ forms the character of its physiognomy and the prognostic
of its fate.
The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that their
business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus
than the metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics and
arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were
obliged to study human nature.
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