The necessary relations between character and government have been so clearly pointed out in the book of L’Esprit des Lois, that one cannot do better than have recourse to that work for the study of those relations.  But speaking generally, there are two plain and simple standards by which to decide whether governments are good or bad.  One is the population.  Every country in which the population is decreasing is on its way to ruin; and the countries in which the population increases most rapidly, even were they the poorest countries in the world, are certainly the best governed. [Footnote:  I only know one exception to this rule—­it is China.] But this population must be the natural result of the government and the national character, for if it is caused by colonisation or any other temporary and accidental cause, then the remedy itself is evidence of the disease.  When Augustus passed laws against celibacy, those laws showed that the Roman empire was already beginning to decline.  Citizens must be induced to marry by the goodness of the government, not compelled to marry by law; you must not examine the effects of force, for the law which strives against the constitution has little or no effect; you should study what is done by the influence of public morals and by the natural inclination of the government, for these alone produce a lasting effect.  It was the policy of the worthy Abbe de Saint-Pierre always to look for a little remedy for every individual ill, instead of tracing them to their common source and seeing if they could not all be cured together.  You do not need to treat separately every sore on a rich man’s body; you should purify the blood which produces them.  They say that in England there are prizes for agriculture; that is enough for me; that is proof enough that agriculture will not flourish there much longer.

The second sign of the goodness or badness of the government and the laws is also to be found in the population, but it is to be found not in its numbers but in its distribution.  Two states equal in size and population may be very unequal in strength; and the more powerful is always that in which the people are more evenly distributed over its territory; the country which has fewer large towns, and makes less show on this account, will always defeat the other.  It is the great towns which exhaust the state and are the cause of its weakness; the wealth which they produce is a sham wealth, there is much money and few goods.  They say the town of Paris is worth a whole province to the King of France; for my own part I believe it costs him more than several provinces.  I believe that Paris is fed by the provinces in more senses than one, and that the greater part of their revenues is poured into that town and stays there, without ever returning to the people or to the king.  It is inconceivable that in this age of calculators there is no one to see that France would be much more powerful if Paris were destroyed.