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indulgent, she has not only tempered the evils with equivalent good, she has even enabled him to augment the good and alleviate the evil: she seems to say: "Feeble work of my hands, I owe you nothing, and I give you life, the world wherein I placed you was not made for you, yet I grant you the use of it; you will find in it a mixture of good and evil; it is for you to distinguish them, and to direct your footsteps in the paths of flowers and thorns. Be the arbiter of your own lot; I put your destiny into your hands."

The same self-love which, moderate and prudent, was a principle of happiness and perfection, becoming blind and disordinate, was transformed into a corrupting poison: and cupidity, offspring and companion of ignorance, became the cause of all the evils which have desolated the earth.

Yes, IGNORANCE and CUPIDITY! these are the twin sources of all that torments the existence of man! biassed by these into false ideas of happiness, he has mistaken or infringed the laws of Nature in his own relations with external objects, and injuring his existence, he has violated individual morality; shutting through these his heart to compassion, and his mind to justice, he has persecuted and afflicted his equal, and violated social morality. Through ignorance and cupidity man has armed against man, family against family, tribe against tribe, and the earth is become a theatre of blood, of discord and of rapine; by ignorance and cupidity, a secret war, fermenting in the bosom of every State, has separated citizen from citizen; and the same society is constituted of oppressors and oppressed, of masters and slaves: by these, the heads of a nation, sometimes insolent and audacious, have forged its chains within its own bowels, and mercenary avarice has founded political despotism: sometimes, hypocritical and deceitful, they have called from heaven a lying power, and a sacrilegious yoke; and credulous cupidity has founded religious despotism; by these in fine have been perverted the ideas of good and evil, just and unjust, vice and virtue; and nations have wandered in a labyrinth of errors and calamities.-The cupidity of man, and his ignorance;-These are the evil genii that have

laid waste the earth! These are the decrees of fate which have overthrown empires! These are the celestial anathemas which have smitten these walls once so glorious, and converted the splendor of a populous city into a soli tude of mourning and of ruins!-But as in the bosom of man have sprung all the evils which afflict his life, there also he is to seek and to find their remedy.

In the infancy of nations, when men yet lived in the forest, subject to the same wants, endowed with the same faculties, all were nearly equal in strength; and that equality was a circumstance highly advantageous in the composition of society; every individual thus finding himself sufficiently independent of every other, no one was the slave, and no one thought of being the master of another. Untaught man knew neither servitude nor tyranny; furnished with resources sufficient for his existence, he thought not of borrowing from others. Owing nothing, exacting nothing, he judged the rights of others by his own, and acquired precise notions of justice; igno rant, moreover, in the art of enjoyments, unable to produce more than his necessaries, possessing nothing superfluous, cupidity lay dormant ; or if excited, man, attacked in his real wants, resisted it with energy, and the very foresight of such resistance maintained a salutary equili brium.

Thus original equality, without a compact, secured personal liberty, respect for property, morality and good or der. Every man labored by himself and for himself; and his heart being occupied, wandered not to culpable desires: his enjoyments were few but his wants were satisfied; and as indulgent Nature had made them less than his resources, the labor of his hands soon produced abun dance; abundance population: the arts developed them, selves, cultivation extended, and the earth, covered with numerous inhabitants, was divided into different domains.

The earth being free, and its possession secure and easy, every man was a proprietor; and the division of property preserved morals, and prevented luxury.

Every one cultivating for himself, culture was more ac tive, produce more abundant, and individual opulence constituted public wealth.

The abundance of produce rendering subsistence easy, population was rapid and numerous, and States attained quickly the term of their plenitude.

Productions increasing beyond consumption, the necessity of commerce was felt, and exchanges took place between people and people which augmented their activity and reciprocal advantages.

CUPIDITY had nevertheless excited among men a constant and universal conflict, which incessantly prompting individuals and societies to reciprocal invasions, occasioned successive revolutions, and returning agitations.

And first, in the savage and barbarous state of the first men, this inordinate and audacious cupidity produced rapine, violence, assassination; and retarded for a long time, the progress of civilization.

When afterwards societies began to be formed, the effect of bad habits, communicated to laws and governments, corrupted their institutions and objects, and established arbitrary and factitious rights; which depraved the ideas of justice, and the morality of the people.

Thus one man being stronger than another, their inequality, an accident of Nature, was taken for her law; and the strong having spared the weak whose life was in his power, arrogated over his person an abusive right of property, and the slavery of individuals prepared the way for the slavery of nations.

Because the head of a family could exercise an absolute authority in his own house, he made his affections and desires the sole rule of his conduct: he gave or resumed his goods without equality, without justice, and paternal despotism laid the foundation of despotism in government. And in societies formed on such foundations, when time and labor had developed riches, cupidity, restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fo mented, in the bosom of every State, an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of professions, classes and families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability of plundering every thing and render. ing every thing subservient' to the dictates of their pas

sions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has been the perpetual scourge of nations.

Sometimes a nation, jealous of its liberty, having appointed agents to administer, these agents assumed to themselves the powers of which they were only the guardians and employed the public treasures in corrupting elections, gaining partisans, and dividing the people against itself. By these means, from being temporary they became perpetual; from elective, hereditary; and the State agitated by the intrigues of the ambitious, by largesses from the rich and factious, by the venality of the indolent poor, by the empiricism of orators, by the boldness of perversity, and the weakness of the virtuous, was convulsed with all the inconveniences of mobocracy. In other countries, tending by other means to the same object, sacred impostors have taken advantage of the credulity of the ignorant. In the gloom of their temples, behind the curtain of the altar, they made their gods act and speak, delivered oracles, worked miracles, ordered sacrifices, levied offerings, prescribed endowments, and, under the names of theocracy and religion, the States were tormented by the passions of the priests.

Sometimes a nation, weary of its dissensions or of its tyrants, to lessen the sources of evil, submitted to a sin gle master but, if it limited his powers, his sole aim was to enlarge them if it left them indefinite, he abused the trust confided to him; and, under the name of monarchy, the State was tormented by the passions of kings, and princes.

During twenty years, says Herodotus, a hundred thousand men labored every day to build the pyramid of the Egyptian king Cheops.-Supposing only three hundred days a year, on account of the Sabbath, there will be 30 millions of days work in a year, and 600 millions in twenty years; at 15 cents a day, this makes 450 millions of franks lost without any further benefit.-With this sum, if the king had shut the isthmus of Suez by a strong wall, like that of China, the destinies of Egypt might have been entirely changed. Foreign invasions would have been stopped, or prevented, and the Arabs of the desert

would neither have conquered nor harassed that country. Sterile labors! how many millions lost in putting one stone upon another, under the form of temples and churches!

On the other hand, emulation finding no object, science no encouragement, the mind sunk into profound ignorance. The administration being secret and mysterious, there existed no means of reform or melioration; the chiefs governing by force or fraud, the people viewed them as a faction of public enemies, and all harmony ceased between the governors and governed.

And hordes of barbarians having reduced entire nations to slavery, the empires formed of conquerors and conquered, united in their bosom two classes essentially opposite and hostile. All the principles of society were dissolved; there was no longer any common interest, any public spirit; and there arose a distinction of casts and races, which reduced into a regular system the maintenance of disorder; and according as a man was born of this or that blood, he was born a slave or a tyrant, property or proprietor.

The oppressors being less numerous than the oppressed, it was necessary to perfect the science of oppression, in order to support this false equilibrium. The art of governing became the art of subjecting the many to the few. To enforce an obedience so contrary to instinct, the seve rest punishments were established; and the cruelty of the laws rendered manners atrocious. The distinctions of persons establishing in the State two codes, two orders of justice, two sets of laws; the people, placed between the propensities of the heart, and the oath uttered from the mouth, had two consciences in contradiction with each other; and the ideas of justice and injustice had no longer any foundation in the understanding.

Hence originated fatal doctrines, gloomy and misanthropic systems of religion, which painted the gods malignant and envious, like their despots. Man, to appease them, offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments: he environed himself in privations, and reversed the laws of nature. Conceiving his pleasures to be crimes, his sufferings expiations, he endeavored to love pain, and to abjure the love of self; he persecuted his senses, hated his life; and

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