they see
among the nations round about them, who are no strict observers of
leagues and treaties. We know how religiously they are observed in
Europe, more particularly where the Christian doctrine is received, among
whom they are sacred and inviolable! which is partly owing to the justice
and goodness of the princes themselves, and partly to the reverence they
pay to the popes, who, as they are the most religious observers of their
own promises, so they exhort all other princes to perform theirs, and,
when fainter methods do not prevail, they compel them to it by the
severity of the pastoral censure, and think that it would be the most
indecent thing possible if men who are particularly distinguished by the
title of 'The Faithful' should not religiously keep the faith of their
treaties. But in that new-found world, which is not more distant from us
in situation than the people are in their manners and course of life,
there is no trusting to leagues, even though they were made with all the
pomp of the most sacred ceremonies; on the contrary, they are on this
account the sooner broken, some slight pretence being found in the words
of the treaties, which are purposely couched in such ambiguous terms that
they can never be so strictly bound but they will always find some
loophole to escape at, and thus they break both their leagues and their
faith; and this is done with such impudence, that those very men who
value themselves on having suggested these expedients to their princes
would, with a haughty scorn, declaim against such craft; or, to speak
plainer, such fraud and deceit, if they found private men make use of it
in their bargains, and would readily say that they deserved to be hanged.

"By this means it is that all sort of justice passes in the world for a
low-spirited and vulgar virtue, far below the dignity of royal
greatness--or at least there are set up two sorts of justice; the one is
mean and creeps on the ground, and, therefore, becomes none but the lower
part of mankind, and so must be kept in severely by many restraints, that
it may not break out beyond the bounds that are set to it; the other is
the peculiar virtue of princes, which, as it is more majestic than that
which becomes the rabble, so takes a freer compass, and thus lawful and
unlawful are only measured by pleasure and interest. These practices of
the princes that lie about Utopia, who make so little account of their
faith, seem to be the reaso