through a period of upwards of four hundred and sixty years, the Roman state, with the exception only of a short interval, had flourished and increased with a degree of prosperity unexampled in the annals of humankind: that the republican form of government was not only best adapted to the improvement of national grandeur, but to the security of general freedom, the great object of all political association: that public virtue, by which alone nations could subsist in vigour, was cherished and protected by no mode of administration so much as by that which connected, in the strongest bonds of
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