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. 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. 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 fir