the developments of reason!  But when you establish old people in a new country, the skill consists in only allowing it those injurious opinions and customs which it is impossible to cure and correct.  If you wish to prevent them from being perpetuated, you will act upon the rising generation by a general and public education of the children.  A prince, or legislator, ought never to found a colony without previously sending wise men there to instruct the youth....  In a new colony, every facility is open to the precautions of the legislator who desires to purify the tone and the manners of the people.  If he has genius and virtue, the lands and the men which are at his disposal will inspire his soul with a plan of society which a writer can only vaguely trace, and in a way which would be subject to the instability of all hypotheses, which are varied and complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine.”

One would think it was a professor of agriculture who was saying to his pupils—­“The climate is the only rule for the agriculturist. His resources dictate to him his duties.  The first thing he has to consider is his local position.  If he is on a clayey soil, he must do so and so.  If he has to contend with sand, this is the way in which he must set about it.  Every facility is open to the agriculturist who wishes to clear and improve his soil.  If he only has the skill, the manure which he has at his disposal will suggest to him a plan of operation, which a professor can only vaguely trace, and in a way that would be subject to the uncertainty of all hypotheses, which vary and are complicated by an infinity of circumstances too difficult to foresee and to combine.”

But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!

Mably. (He is supposing the laws to be worn out by time and by the neglect of security, and continues thus):—­

“Under these circumstances, we must be convinced that the springs of Government are relaxed. Give them a new tension (it is the reader who is addressed), and the evil will be remedied....  Think lees of punishing the faults than of encouraging the virtues which you want.  By this method you will bestow upon your republic the vigour of youth.  Through ignorance of this, a free people has lost its liberty!  But if the evil has made so much way that the ordinary magistrates are unable to remedy it effectually, have recourse to an extraordinary magistracy, whose time should be short, and its power considerable.  The imagination of the citizens requires to be impressed.”

In this style he goes on through twenty volumes.