and consequently the mechanics must be in a momentary necessity.

Whenever this happens, the State is obliged to lend them a ready assistance; whether it be to prevent the sufferings of the people, or to avoid a rebellion. In this case hospitals, or some equivalent regulations, are necessary to prevent this misery.

But when the nation is poor, private poverty springs from the general calamity; and is, if I may so express myself, the general calamity itself. All the hospitals in the world cannot cure this private poverty; on the contrary, the spirit of indolence which it constantly inspires, increases the general and consequently the private misery.

Henry VIII., resolving to reform the Church of England, ruined the monks, of themselves a lazy set of people, that encouraged laziness in others; because, as they practiced hospitality, an infinite number of idle persons, gentlemen and citizens, spent their lives in running from convent to convent. He demolished even the hospitals, in which the lower people found subsistence, as the gentlemen did theirs in the monasteries. Since these changes, the spirit of trade and industry has been established in England.

At Rome the hospitals place every one at his ease except those who labor, except those who are industrious, except those who have land, except those who are engaged in trade.

I have observed that wealthy nations have need of hospitals, because fortune subjects them to a thousand accidents; but it is plain that transient assistances are much better than perpetual foundations. The evil is momentary; it is necessary therefore that the succor should be of the same nature, and that it be applied to particular accidents.

TH

ON RELIGION

From the Spirit of Laws

HE different religions of the world do not give to those who profess them equal motives of attachment: this depends greatly on the manner in which they agree with the turn of thought and perceptions of mankind. We are extremely addicted to idolatry, and yet have no great inclination for the religion of idolaters; we are not very fond of spiritual ideas, and

yet are most attached to those religions which teach us to adore a spiritual being. This proceeds from the satisfaction we find in ourselves at having been so intelligent as to choose a religion which raises the Deity from that baseness in which he had been placed by others. We look upon idolatry as the religion of an ignorant people; and the religion which has a spiritual being for its object as that of the most enlightened nations.

When with a doctrine that gives us the idea of a spiritual supreme being, we can still join those of a sensible nature, and admit them into our worship, we contract a greater attachment to religion; because those motives which we have just mentioned are added to our natural inclinations for the objects of sense. Thus the Catholics, who have more of this kind of worship than the Protestants, are more attached to their religion than the Protestants are to theirs, and more zealous for its propagation.

When the people of Ephesus were informed that the fathers of the council had declared they might call the Virgin Mary the Mother of God, they were transported with joy; they kissed the hands of the bishops, they embraced their knees, and the whole city resounded with acclamations.

When an intellectual religion superadds a choice made by the Deity, and a preference of those who profess it to those who do not, this greatly attaches us to religion. The Mahometans would not be such good Mussulmans, if on the one hand there were not idolatrous nations who make them imagine themselves the champions of the unity of God; and on the other, Christians to make them believe that they are the objects of his preference. A religion burthened with many ceremonies attaches us to it more strongly than that which has a fewer number. We have an extreme propensity to things in which we are continually employed: witness the obstinate prejudices of the Mahometans and the Jews, and the readiness with which barbarous and savage nations change their religion,-who, as they are employed entirely in hunting or war, have but few religious ceremonies.

Men are extremely inclined to the passions of hope and fear: a religion therefore that had neither a heaven nor a hell could hardly please them. This is proved by the ease with which foreign religions have been established in Japan, and the zeal and fondness with which they were received.

In order to raise an attachment to religion, it is necessary that it should inculcate pure morals. Men who are knaves by retail are extremely honest in the gross: they love morality.

And were I not treating of so grave a subject, I should say that this appears remarkably evident in our theatres: we are sure of pleasing the people by sentiments avowed by morality; we are sure of shocking them by those it disapproves.

When external worship is attended with great magnificence, it flatters our minds, and strongly attaches us to religion. The riches of temples, and those of the clergy, greatly affect us. Thus, even the misery of the people is a motive that renders. them fond of a religion which has served as a pretext to those who were the cause of their misery.

ON TWO CAUSES WHICH DESTROYED ROME

From the Grandeur and Decadence of the Roman Empire>

HILST the sovereignty of Rome was confined to Italy, it was

W easy for the commonwealth to subsist: every soldier was

at the same time a citizen; every consul raised an army, and other citizens marched into the field under his successor: as their forces were not very numerous, such persons only were received among the troops as had possessions considerable enough to make them interested in the preservation of the city; the Senate kept a watchful eye over the conduct of the generals, and did not give them an opportunity of machinating anything to the prejudice of their country.

But after the legions had passed the Alps and crossed the sea, the soldiers whom the Romans had been obliged to leave during several campaigns in the countries they were subduing, lost insensibly that genius and turn of mind which characterized a Roman citizen; and the generals having armies and kingdoms at their disposal were sensible of their own strength, and would no longer obey.

The soldiers therefore began to acknowledge no superior but their general; to found their hopes on him only, and to view the city as from a great distance: they were no longer the soldiers of the republic, but of Sylla, of Marius, of Pompey, and of Cæsar. The Romans could no longer tell whether the person who headed an army in a province was their general or their enemy.

So long as the people of Rome were corrupted by their tribunes only, on whom they could bestow nothing but their power, the Senate could easily defend themselves, because they acted consistently and with one regular tenor, whereas the common

people were continually shifting from the extremes of fury to the extremes of cowardice; but when they were enabled to invest their favorites with a formidable exterior authority, the whole wisdom of the Senate was baffled, and the commonwealth was undone.

The reason why free States are not so permanent as other forms of government is because the misfortunes and successes which happen to them generally occasion the loss of liberty; whereas the successes and misfortunes of an arbitrary government contribute equally to the enslaving of the people. A wise republic ought not to run any hazard which may expose it to good or ill fortune; the only happiness the several individuals of it should aspire after is to give perpetuity to their State.

If the unbounded extent of the Roman empire proved the ruin of the republic, the vast compass of the city was no less fatal to it.

The Romans had subdued the whole universe by the assistance of the nations of Italy, on whom they had bestowed various privileges at different times. Most of those nations did not at first set any great value on the freedom of the city of Rome, and some chose rather to preserve their ancient usages; but when this privilege became that of universal sovereignty,- when a man who was not a Roman citizen was considered as nothing, and with this title was everything,- the people of Italy resolved either to be Romans or die: not being able to obtain this by cabals and entreaties, they had recourse to arms; and rising in all that part of Italy opposite to the Ionian sea, the rest of the allies were going to follow their example. Rome, being now forced to combat against those who were, if I may be allowed the figure, the hands with which they shackled the universe, was upon the brink of ruin; the Romans were going to be confined merely to their walls: they therefore granted this so much wishedfor privilege to the allies who had not yet been wanting in fidelity; and they indulged it, by insensible degrees, to all other nations.

But now Rome was no longer that city the inhabitants of which had breathed one and the same spirit, the same love for liberty, the same hatred of tyranny; a city in which a jealousy of the power of the Senate and of the prerogatives of the great (ever accompanied with respect) was only a love of equality. The nations of Italy being made citizens of Rome, every

city brought thither its genius, its particular interests, and its dependence on some mighty protector: Rome, being now rent and divided, no longer formed one entire body, and men were no longer citizens of it but in a kind of fictitious way; as there were no longer the same magistrates, the same walls, the same gods, the same temples, the same burying-places, Rome was no longer beheld with the same eyes; the citizens were no longer fired with the same love for their country, and the Roman sentiments were obliterated.

Cities and nations were now invited to Rome by the ambitious, to disconcert the suffrages, or influence them in their own favor; the public assemblies were so many conspiracies against the State, and a tumultuous crowd of seditious wretches was dignified with the title of Comitia. The authority of the people and their laws-nay, that people themselves—were no more than so many chimæras; and so universal was the anarchy of those times, that it was not possible to determine whether the people had made a law or not.

Authors enlarge very copiously on the divisions which proved the destruction of Rome; but their readers seldom discover those divisions to have been always necessary and inevitable. The grandeur of the republic was the only source of that calamity, and exasperated popular tumults into civil wars. Dissensions were not to be prevented; and those martial spirits which were so fierce and formidable abroad could not be habituated to any considerable moderation at home. Those who expect in a free State to see the people undaunted in war and pusillanimous in peace, are certainly desirous of impossibilities; and it may be advanced as a general rule that whenever a perfect calm is visible, in a State that calls itself a republic, the spirit of liberty no longer subsists.

Union, in a body politic, is a very equivocal term: true union is such a harmony as makes all the particular parts, as opposite as they may seem to us, concur to the general welfare of the society, in the same manner as discords in music contribute to the general melody of sound. Union may prevail in a State full of seeming commotions; or in other words, there may be a harmony from whence results prosperity, which alone is true peace; and may be considered in the same view as the various parts of this universe, which are eternally connected by the action of some and the reaction of others.