Page 112 - UTOPIA

ous 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 them-
selves 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 man-
kind, 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 reasons that determine them to
engage in no confederacy. Perhaps they would change their
mind if they lived among us; but yet, though treaties were
more religiously observed, they would still dislike the cus-
tom of making them, since the world has taken up a false
maxim upon it, as if there were no tie of nature uniting one
nation to another, only separated perhaps by a mountain
or a river, and that all were born in a state of hostility, and

112 Utopia