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 first sort of
legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and
combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and
alchemistical legislators, have taken the directly contrary course. They
have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they could,
into one homogeneous mass; and then they divided this their amalgama
into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose
counters, merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures
whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The elements of
their own metaphysics might have taught them better lessons. The troll
of their categorical table might have informed them that there was
something else in the intellectual world besides SUBSTANCE and QUANTITY.
They might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there were eight
heads more, in every complex deliberation, which they have never thought
of; though these, of all the ten, are the subjects on which the skill
of man can operate anything at all. So far from this able disposition of
some of the old republican legislators, which follows with a solicitous
accuracy the moral conditions and propensities of men, they have leveled
and crushed together all the orders which they found, even under the
coarse, unartificial arrangement of the monarchy, in which mode of
government the classing of the citizens is not of so much importance as
in a republic. It is true, however, that every such classification, if
properly ordered, is good in all forms of government; and composes a
strong barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is the
necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a republic. For want
of something of this kind, if the present project of a republic should
fail, all securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it; all the
indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that
if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in France,
under this or under any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not
voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of
the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared
on earth. This is to play a most desperate game.