Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/126

88 their hores, hounds, and vaals, will run down the king as they would hunt a deer, wihing for nothing o much as to be in at the death.

The philoophical king Stanilaus felt mot everely this want of a people. In his obervations on the government of Poland, publihed in the Œuvres du Philoophe bienfaiant, tom. iii. he laments, in very pathetic terms, the mieries to which they were reduced.

"The violences," ays he, "which the patricians at Rome exercied over the people of that city, before they had recoure to open force, and, by the authority of their tribunes, balanced the power of the nobility, are a triking picture of the cruelty with which we treat our plebeians. This portion of our late is more debaed among us than they were among the Romans, where they enjoyed a pecies of liberty, even in the times when they were mot enlaved to the firt order of the republic. We may ay with truth, that the people are, in Poland, in a tate of extreme humiliation. We mut, nevertheles, confider them as the principal upport of the nation; and I am peruaded, that the little value we et on them will have very dangerous conequences.—Who are they, in fact, who procure abundance in the kingdom? who are they that bear the burthens, and pay the taxes? who are they that furnih men to our armies? who labour our fields? who gather in the crops? who utain and nourih us? who are the caue of our inactivity? the refuge of our lazines? the reource for our wants? the upport of our luxury? and indeed the ource of all our pleaures? Is it not that very populace that we "treat