Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/23

Rh wants of the people; and his anwers were recorded as laws for their government. The laws of Lacedæmon were communicated by Apollo to Lycurgus; and, let the meaning of the deity hould not have been perfectly comprehended, or correctly expreed, were afterwards confirmed by his oracle at Delphos. Among the Romans, Numa was indebted for thoe laws which procured the properity of his country to his converations with Egeria. The Greeks imported thee myteries from Egypt and the Eat, whoe depotims, from the remotet antiquity to this day, have been founded in the ame olemn empiricim; their emperors and nobles being all decended from their gods. Woden and Thor were divinities too; and their poterity ruled a thouand years in the north by the trength of a like credulity. Manco Capac was the child of the un, the viible deity of the Peruvians; and tranmitted his divinity, as well as his earthly dignity and authority, through a line of incas. And the rudet tribes of avages in North America have certain families under the immediate protection of the god war, from which their leaders are always choen. There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it mere than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the firt example of ments