each of them in his kind: but what destiny was it that placed them in
these times, men so remote from and so disproportioned to our corruption
and intestine tumults?

Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation: change only gives
form to injustice and tyranny. When any piece is loosened, it may be
proper to stay it; one may take care that the alteration and corruption
natural to all things do not carry us too far from our beginnings and
principles: but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to change
the foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do, who to make
clean, efface; who reform particular defects by an universal confusion,
and cure diseases by death:

"Non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi."

["Not so desirous of changing as of overthrowing things."
--Cicero, De 0ffic., ii. i.]

The world is unapt to be cured; and so impatient of anything that presses
it, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself at what price
soever. We see by a thousand examples, that it ordinarily cures itself
to its cost. The discharge of a present evil is no cure, if there be not
a general amendment of condition. The surgeon's end is not only to cut
away the dead flesh; that is but the progress of his cure; he has a care,
over and above, to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh,
and to restore the member to its due state. Whoever only proposes to
himself to remove that which offends him, falls short: for good does not
necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it
happened to Caesar's murderers, who brought the republic to such a pass,
that they had reason to repent the meddling with the matter. The same