erformance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into
faction. Commonwealths are made of families, free commonwealths of
parties also; and we may as well affirm, that our natural regards and
ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the
bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country.

Some legislators went so far as to make neutrality in party a crime
against the state. I do not know whether this might not have been rather
to overstrain the principle. Certain it is, the best patriots in the
greatest commonwealths have always commended and promoted such
connections. _Idem sentire de republica_, was with them a principal
ground of friendship and attachment; nor do I know any other capable of
forming firmer, dearer, more pleasing, more honorable, and more virtuous
habitudes. The Romans carried this principle a great way. Even the
holding of offices together, the disposition of which arose from chance,
not selection, gave rise to a relation which continued for life. It was
called _necessitudo sortis_; and it was looked upon with a sacred
reverence. Breaches of any of these kinds of civil relation were
considered as acts of the most distinguished turpitude. The whole people
was distributed into political societies, in which they acted in support
of such interests in the state as they severally affected. For it was
then thought no crime to endeavor by every honest means to advance to
superiority and power those of your own sentiments and opinions. This
wise people was far from imagining that those connections had no tie,
and obliged to no duty; but that men might quit them without shame, upon
every call of interest. They believed private honor to be the great
foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step towards
patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he
regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in a public
situation, might probably consult some other interest than his own.
Never may we become _plus sages que les sages_, as the French comedian
has happily expressed it, wiser than all the wise and good men who have
lived before us. It was their wish, to see public and private virtues,
not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously
combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation,
reciprocally supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate
periods of our history thi