Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/219

Rh end, and changes to force and violence. For the people, accutomed to live at the expence of others, and to place their hopes of a upport in the fortunes of their neighbours, if headed by a man of a great and enterprizing pirit, will then have recoure to violence, and getting together, will murder, banih, and divide among themelves the lands of their adveraries, till, grown wild with rage, they again find a mater and a monarch.

This is the rotation of governments, and this the order of nature, by which they are changed, transformed, and return to the ame point of the circle.

Lycurgus oberving that all this was founded on neceity and the laws of nature, concluded, that every form of government that is imple, by oon degenerating into that vice that is allied to it, and naturally attends it, mud be untable. For as rut is the natural bane of iron, and worms of wood, by which they are ure to be detroyed, o there is a certain vice implanted by the hand of nature in every imple form of government, and by her ordained to accompany it. The vice of kingly government is monarchy; that of aritocracy, oligarchy; and of democracy, rage and violence; into which all of them, in proces of time, mut necearily degenerate. To avoid which Lycurgus united in one all the advantages of the bed governments, to the end that no branch of it, by welling beyond its bounds, might degenerate into the vice that is congenial to it, and that, while each was mutually acted upon by oppoite powers, no one part might outweigh the ret. The Romans arrived at the ame end by the ame means.

Polybius, you perceive, my dear Sir, is more charitable in his repreentation of human nature than