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But if we discard this definition of a people, and, assuming
another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound
together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then,
in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to
observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an
assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound
together by an agreement as to the objects of love. it is reasonably
called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it
is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is
bound together by lower. According to this definition of ours, the
Roman people is a people, and its weal is without doubt a commonwealth
or republic. But what its tastes were in its early and subsequent
days, and how it declined into sanguinary seditions and then to social
and civil wars, and so burst asunder or rotted off the bond of concord
in which the health of a people consists, history shows, and in the
preceding books I have related at large. And yet I would not on this
account say either that it was not a people, or that its administration
was not a republic, so long as there remains an assemblage of
reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects
of love. But what I say of this people and of this republic I must
be understood to think and say of the Athenians or any Greek state,
of the Egyptians, of the early Assyrian Babylon, and of every other
nation, great or small, which had a public government. For, in
general, the city of the ungodly, which did not obey the command of
God that it should offer no sacrifice save to Him alone, and which,
therefore, could not give to the soul its proper command over the
body, nor to the reason its just authority over the vices, is void of
true justice.
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