ble and precarious. The best security which human
wisdom can devise, seems to be the distribution of political authority
among different individuals and bodies, with separate interests and
separate characters, corresponding to the variety of classes of which
civil society is composed, each interested to guard their own order from
oppression by the rest; each also interested to prevent any of the
others from seizing on exclusive, and therefore despotic power; and all
having a common interest to co-operate in carrying on the ordinary and
necessary administration of government. If there were not an interest to
resist each other in extraordinary cases, there would not be liberty. If
there were not an interest to co-operate in the ordinary course of
affairs, there could be no government. The object of such wise
institutions which make the selfishness of governors a security against
their injustice, is to protect men against wrong both from their rulers
and their fellows. Such governments are, with justice, peculiarly and
emphatically called _free_; and in ascribing that liberty to the skilful
combination of mutual dependence and mutual check, I feel my own
conviction greatly strengthened by calling to mind, that in this opinion
I agree with all the wise men who have ever deeply considered the
principles of politics; with Aristotle and Polybius, with Cicero and
Tacitus, with Bacon and Machiavel, with Montesquieu and Hume.[22] It is
impossible in such a cursory sketch as the present, even to allude to a
very small part of those philosophical principles, political reasonings,
and historical facts, which are necessary for the illustration of this
momentous subject. In a full discussion of it I shall be obliged to
examine the general frame of the most celebrated governments of ancient
and modern times, and especially of those which have been most renowned
for their freedom. The result of such an examination will be, that no
institution so detestable as an absolutely unbalanced government,
perhaps ever existed; that the simple governments are mere creatures of
the imagination of theorists, who have transformed names used for the
convenience of arrangement into real polities; that, as constitutions of
government approach more nearly to that unmixed and uncontrolled
simplicity they become despotic, and as they recede farther from that
simplicity they become free.

By the constitution of a state, I mean "_the body of those written and