m corruption itself.

Rome was founded for grandeur, and her laws had an admirable tendency
to bestow it; for which reason, in all the variations of her
government, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or popular, she constantly
engaged in enterprises which required conduct to accomplish them, and
always succeeded. The experience of a day did not furnish her with
more wisdom than all other nations, but she obtained it by a long
succession of events. She sustained a small, a moderate, and an
immense fortune with the same superiority, derived true welfare from
the whole train of her prosperities, and refined every instance of
calamity into beneficial instructions.

She lost her liberty because she completed her work too soon.

II

OF THE RELATION OF LAWS TO DIFFERENT HUMAN BEINGS[39]

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations
arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their
laws; the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the
intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man
his laws.

[Footnote 39: From "The Spirit of Laws." The translation of Thomas
Nugent was published in 1756.]

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we
behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more
unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive
of intelligent beings?

There is, then, a primitive reason; and laws are the relations
subsisting between it and different beings, and the relations of these
to one another.

God is related to the universe, as Creator and Preserver; the laws by
which He created all things are those by which He preserves them. He
acts according to these rules, because He knows them; He knows them,
because He made them; and He made them, because they are relative to
His wisdom and power.

Since we observe that the world, tho formed by the motion of matter,
and void of understanding, subsists through so long a succession of
ages, its motions must certainly be directed by invariable laws; and
could we imagine another world, it must also have constant rules, or
it would inevitably perish.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary net, supposes laws as
invariable as those of the fatality of the atheists. It would be
absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without these
rules, since without them it could not subsist.

These rules are a fixt and variable