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. 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.
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