he
Romans never knew the dreadful folly of religious wars, an abomination
reserved for devout preachers of patience and humility. Marius and
Sylla, Caesar and Pompey, Anthony and Augustus, did not draw their swords
and set the world in a blaze merely to determine whether the flamen
should wear his shirt over his robe, or his robe over his shirt, or
whether the sacred chickens should eat and drink, or eat only, in order
to take the augury. The English have hanged one another by law, and cut
one another to pieces in pitched battles, for quarrels of as trifling a
nature. The sects of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians quite
distracted these very serious heads for a time. But I fancy they will
hardly ever be so silly again, they seeming to be grown wiser at their
own expense; and I do not perceive the least inclination in them to
murder one another merely about syllogisms, as some zealots among them
once did.

But here follows a more essential difference between Rome and England,
which gives the advantage entirely to the latter--viz., that the civil
wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty. The
English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe
limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of
struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince
is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from
committing evil; where the nobles are great without insolence, though
there are no vassals; and where the people share in the Government
without confusion.

The House of Lords and that of the Commons divide the legislative power
under the king, but the Romans had no such balance. The patricians and
plebeians in Rome were perpetually at variance, and there was no
intermediate power to reconcile them. The Roman senate, who were so
unjustly, so criminally proud as not to suffer the plebeians to share
with them in anything, could find no other artifice to keep the latter
out of the administration than by employing them in foreign wars. They
considered the plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behoved them to let
loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their masters.
Thus the greatest defect in the Government of the Romans raised them to
be conquerors. By being unhappy at home, they triumphed over and
possessed themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them
to slavery.

The Government of