In a despotic state, indeed, which is every government where the power is immoderately exerted, a real division is perpetually kindled. The peasant, the soldier, the merchant, the magistrate, and the grandee, have no other conjunction than what arises from the ability of the one to oppress the other without resistance; and if at any time a union happens to be introduced, citizens are not then united, but dead bodies are laid in the grave contiguous to each other. It must be acknowledged that the Roman laws were too weak to govern the republic; but experience has proved it to be an invariable fact that good laws, which raise the reputation and power of a small republic, become incommodious to it when once its grandeur is established, because it was their natural effect to make a great people but not to govern them. The difference is very considerable between good laws and those which may be called convenient; between such laws as give a people dominion over others, and such as continue them in the possession of power when they have once acquired it. There is at this time a republic in the world (the Canton of Berne), of which few persons have any knowledge, and which, by plans accomplished in silence and secrecy, is daily enlarging its power. And certain it is that if it ever rises to that height of grandeur for which it seems preordained by its wisdom, it must inevitably change its laws; and the necessary innovations will not be effected by any legislator, but must spring from 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?