O Genius, said I, encouraged by these words, since my reason is free, I strive in vain to entertain the flattering hope with which you endeavor to console me.  The sensible and virtuous soul is easily caught with dreams of happiness; but a cruel reality constantly awakens it to suffering and wretchedness.  The more I meditate on the nature of man, the more I examine the present state of societies, the less possible it appears to realize a world of wisdom and felicity.  I cast my eye over the whole of our hemisphere; I perceive in no place the germ, nor do I foresee the instinctive energy of a happy revolution.  All Asia lies buried in profound darkness.  The Chinese, governed by an insolent despotism,* by strokes of the bamboo and the cast of lots, restrained by an immutable code of gestures, and by the radical vices of an ill-constructed language,** appear to be in their abortive civilization nothing but a race of automatons.  The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy.  The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors.  The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families.  The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude.  In the North I see nothing but vilified serfs, herds of men with which landlords stock their estates.  Ignorance, tyranny, and wretchedness have everywhere stupified the nations; and vicious habits, depraving the natural senses, have destroyed the very instinct of happiness and of truth.

* The emperor of China calls himself the son of heaven; that is, of God:  for in the opinion of the Chinese, the material of heaven, the arbiter of fatality, is the Deity himself.  “The emperor only shows himself once in ten months, lest the people, accustomed to see him, might lose their respect; for he holds it as a maxim that power can only be supported by force, that the people have no idea of justice, and are not to be governed but by coercion.”  Narrative of two Mahometan travellers in 851 and 877, translated by the Abbe Renaudot in 1718.

Notwithstanding what is asserted by the missionaries, this situation has undergone no change.  The bamboo still reigns in China, and the son of heaven bastinades, for the most trivial fault, the Mandarin, who in his turn bastinades the people.  The Jesuits may tell us that this is the best governed country in the world, and its inhabitants the happiest of men:  but a single letter from Amyot has convinced me that China is a truly Turkish government, and the account of Sonnerat confirms it.  See Vol.  II. of Voyage aux Indes, in 4to.

** As long as the Chinese shall in writing make use of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilization.