Annals

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The line the essay renders as "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws" is Annals III.27, in Latin:

et corruptissima re publica plurimae leges

Perseus gives it as "laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt". The essay's version compresses a specific clause about Rome's own legislative history into a general aphorism, which is faithful in meaning but broader in scope than the original.

The essay's own gloss, that Tacitus "had the causation half right" and that it runs both ways, is doing more work than the quotation itself supports, and is the essay's argument rather than his.