avarice or partial
affections, there must follow a dissolution of justice, the chief sinew
of society.

The Utopians call those nations that come and ask magistrates from them,
neighbours; but those to whom they have been of more particular service,
friends. And as all other nations are perpetually either making leagues
or breaking them, they never enter into an alliance with any state. They
think leagues are useless things, and believe that if the common ties of
humanity do not knit men together, the faith of promises will have no
great effect; and they are the more confirmed in this by what they see
among the nations round about them, who are no strict observers of
leagues and treaties. We know how religiously they are observed in
Europe, more particularly where the Christian doctrine is received,
among whom they are sacred and inviolable. Which is partly owing to the
justice and goodness of the princes themselves, and partly to the
reverence they pay to the popes; who as they are most religious
observers of their own promises, so they exhort all other princes to
perform theirs; and when fainter methods do not prevail, they compel
them to it by the severity of the pastoral censure, and think that it
would be the most indecent thing possible if men who are particularly
distinguished by the title of the faithful, should not religiously keep
the faith of their treaties. But in that new-found world, which is not
more distant from us in situation than the people are in their manners
and course of life, there is no trusting to leagues, even though they
were made with all the pomp of the most sacred ceremonies; on the
contrary, they are on this account the sooner broken, some slight
pretence being found in the words of the treaties, which are purposely
couched in such ambiguous terms that they can never be so strictly bound
but they will always find some loophole to escape at; and thus they
break both their leagues and their faith. And this is done with such
impudence, that those very men who value themselves on having suggested
these expedients to their princes, would with a haughty scorn declaim
against such craft, or to speak plainer, such fraud and deceit, if they
found private men make use of it in their bargains, and would readily
say that they deserved to be hanged.

By this means it is, that all sort of justice passes in the world for a
low-spirited and vulgar virtue, far below the dignity of royal
greatness. Or at