From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their
citizens into such classes, and to place them in such situations in the
state as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill, and to allot
to them such appropriated privileges as might secure to them what their
specific occasions required, and which might furnish to each description
such force as might protect it in the conflict caused by the diversity
of interests that must exist, and must contend, in all complex society;
for the legislator would have been ashamed that the coarse husbandman
should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses, and oxen,
and should have enough of common sense not to abstract and equalize them
all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food,
care, and employment; whilst he, the economist, disposer, and shepherd
of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was
resolved to know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for
this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that in their
classification of the citizens, the great legislators of antiquity made
the greatest display of their powers, and even soared above themselves.
It is here that your modern legislators have gone deep into the negative
series, and sunk even below their own nothing. As the first sort of
legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined
them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and
alchemistical legislators, have taken the directly contrary course.
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