Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, but
not for their punishment. Nations themselves are such corporations. As
well might we in England think of waging inexpiable war upon all
Frenchmen for the evils which they have brought upon us in the several
periods of our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think
yourselves justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of the
unparalleled calamities brought upon the people of France by the unjust
invasions of our Henries and our Edwards. Indeed, we should be mutually
justified in this exterminatory war upon each other, full as much as you
are in the unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen, on account
of the conduct of men of the same name in other times.
LEGISLATION AND REPUBLICANS.
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. They had to do with citizens, and they
were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated
by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the
operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination;
and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth,
their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their
residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring
and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property
itself, all which rendered them as it were so many different species of
animals.
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