Regimen is superior to medicine, especially as, from time immemorial, out of every hundred physicians, ninety-eight are charlatans. Molière was right in laughing at them; for nothing is more ridiculous than to witness an infinite number of silly women, and men no less than women, when they have eaten, drunk, sported, or abstained from repose too much, call in a physician for the headache, invoke him like a god, and request him to work the miracle of producing an alliance between health and intemperance, not omitting to fee the said god, who laughs at their folly.
It is not, however, the less true that an able physician may preserve life on a hundred occasions, and restore to us the use of our limbs. When a man falls into an apoplexy, it is neither a captain of infantry nor a sergeant at law who will cure him. If cataracts are formed on my eyes, it is not my neighbor who will relieve me. I distinguish not between physicians and surgeons, these professions being so intimately connected.
Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create. The Roman people had no physicians for more than five hundred years. This people, whose sole occupation was slaughter, in particular cultivated not the art of prolonging life. What, therefore, happened at Rome to those who had a putrid fever, a fistula, a gangrene, or an inflammation of the stomach? They died. The small number of great physicians introduced into Rome were only slaves. A physician among the great Roman patricians was a species of luxury, like a cook. Every rich man had his perfumers, his bathers, his harpers, and his physician. The celebrated Musa, the physician of Augustus, was a slave; he was freed and made a Roman knight; after which physicians became persons of consideration.
When Christianity was so fully established as to bestow on us the felicity of possessing monks, they were expressly forbidden, by many councils, from practising medicine. They should have prescribed a precisely contrary line of conduct, if it were desirable to render them useful to mankind.
How beneficial to society were monks obliged to study medicine and to cure our ailments for God's sake! Having nothing to gain but heaven, they would never be charlatans; they would equally instruct themselves in our diseases and their remedies, one of the finest of occupations, and the only one forbidden them. It has been objected that they would poison the impious; but even that would be advantageous to the church. Had this been the case, Luther would never have stolen one-half of Catholic Europe from our holy father, the pope; for in the first fever which might have seized the Augustine Luther, a Dominican would have prepared his pills. You will tell me that he would not have taken them; but with a little address this might have been managed. But to proceed:
Towards the year 1517 lived a citizen, animated with a Christian zeal, named John; I do not mean John Calvin, but John, surnamed of God, who instituted the Brothers of Charity. This body, instituted for the redemption of captives, is composed of the only useful monks, although not accounted among the orders. The Dominicans, Bernardines, Norbertins, and Benedictines, acknowledge not the Brothers of Charity. They are simply adverted to in the continuation of the "Ecclesiastical History" of Fleury. Why? Because they have performed cures instead of miracles—have been useful and not caballed—cured poor women without either directing or seducing them. Lastly, their institution being charitable, it is proper that other monks should despise them.
Medicine, having then become a mercenary profession in the world, as the administration of justice is in many places, it has become liable to strange abuses. But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. Such a man is very superior to the general of the Capuchins, however respectable this general may be.
In the time of Cardinal Richelieu, when the Spaniards and French detested each other, because Ferdinand the Catholic laughed at Louis XII., and Francis I. was taken at the battle of Pavia by an army of Charles V.—while this hatred was so strong that the false author of the political romance, and political piece of tediousness, called the "Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu," feared not to call the Spaniards "an insatiable nation, who rendered the Indies tributaries of hell"; when, in short, we were leagued in 1635 with Holland against Spain; when France had nothing in America, and the Spaniards covered the seas with their galleys—then buccaneers began to appear. They were at first French adventurers, whose quality was at most that of corsairs.
One of them, named Legrande, a native of Dieppe, associated himself with fifty determined men, and went to tempt fortune in a bark which had not even a cannon. Towards the Isle of Hispaniola (St. Domingo), he perceived a galley strayed from the great Spanish fleet; he approached it as a captain wishing to sell provisions; he mounted, attended by his people; he entered the chamber of the captain, who was playing at cards, threw him down, made him prisoner with his cargo, and returned to Dieppe with his vessel laden with immense riches. This adventure was the signal for forty years' unheard-of exploits.
French, English, and Dutch buccaneers associated together in the caverns of St. Domingo, of the little islands of St. Christopher and Tortola. They chose a chief for each expedition, which was the first origin of kings. Agriculturists would never have wished for a king; they had no need of one to sow, thrash, and sell corn.
When the buccaneers took a great prize, they bought with it a little vessel and cannon. One happy chance produced twenty others. If they were a hundred in number they were believed to be a thousand; it was difficult to escape them, still more so to follow them. They were birds of prey who established themselves on all sides, and who retired into inaccessible places; sometimes they ravaged from four to five hundred leagues of coast; sometimes they advanced on foot, or horseback, two hundred leagues up the countries. They surprised and pillaged the rich towns of Chagra, Maracaybo, Vera Cruz, Panama, Porto Rico, Campeachy, the island of St. Catherine, and the suburbs of Cartagena.
One of these pirates, named Olonois, penetrated to the gates of Havana, followed by twenty men only. Having afterwards retired into his boat, the governor sent against him a ship of war with soldiers and an executioner. Olonois rendered himself master of the vessel, cut off the heads of the Spanish soldiers, whom he had taken himself, and sent back the executioner to the governor. Such astonishing actions were never performed by the Romans, or by other robbers. The warlike voyage of Admiral Anson round the world is only an agreeable promenade in comparison with the passage of the buccaneers in the South Sea, and with what they endured on terra firma.
Had their policy been equal to their invincible courage, they would have founded a great empire in America. They wanted females; but instead of ravishing and marrying Sabines, like the Romans, they procured them from the brothels of Paris, which sufficed not to produce a second generation.
They were more cruel towards the Spaniards than the Israelites ever were to the Canaanites. A Dutchman is spoken of, named Roc, who put several Spaniards on a spit and caused them to be eaten by his comrades. Their expeditions were tours of thieves, and never campaigns of conquerors; thus, in all the West Indies, they were never called anything butlos ladrones.When they surprised and entered the house of a father of a family, they put him to the torture to discover his treasures. That sufficiently proves what we say in the article "Question," that torture was invented by robbers.
What rendered their exploits useless was, that they lavished in debauches, as foolish as monstrous, all that they acquired by rapine and murder. Finally, there remains nothing more of them than their name, and scarcely that. Such were the buccaneers.
But what people in Europe have not been pirates? The Goths, Alans, Vandals, and Huns, were they anything else? What were Rollo, who established himself in Normandy, and William Fier-a-bras, but the most able pirates? Was not Clovis a pirate, who came from the borders of the Rhine into Gaul?
It is said that this word is derived from the Latin wordplaga,and that it signifies the condemnation to the scourge of those who sold freemen for slaves. This has nothing in common with the plagiarism of authors, who sell not men either enslaved or free. They only for a little money occasionally sell themselves.
When an author sells the thoughts of another man for his own, the larceny is called plagiarism. All the makers of dictionaries, all compilers who do nothing else than repeat backwards and forwards the opinions, the errors, the impostures, and the truths already printed, we may term plagiarists, but honest plagiarists, who arrogate not the merit of invention. They pretend not even to have collected from the ancients the materials which they get together; they only copy the laborious compilers of the sixteenth century. They will sell you in quarto that which already exists in folio. Call them if you please bookmakers, not authors; range them rather among second-hand dealers than plagiarists.
The true plagiarist is he who gives the works of another for his own, who inserts in his rhapsodies long passages from a good book a little modified. The enlightened reader, seeing this patch of cloth of gold upon a blanket, soon detects the bungling purloiner.
Ramsay, who after having been a Presbyterian in his native Scotland, an Anglican in London, then a Quaker, and who finally persuaded Fénelon that he was a Catholic, and even pretended a penchant for celestial love—Ramsay, I say, compiled the "Travels of Cyrus," because his master made his Telemachus travel. So far he only imitated; but in these travels he copies from an old English author, who introduces a young solitary dissecting his dead goat, and arriving at a knowledge of the Deity by the process, which is very much like plagiarism. On conducting Cyrus into Egypt, in describing that singular country, he employs the same expressions as Bossuet, whom he copies word for word without citing; this is plagiarism complete. One of my friends reproached him with this one day; Ramsay replied that he was not aware of it, and that it was not surprising he should think like Fénelon and write like Bossuet. This was making out the adage, "Proud as a Scotsman."
The most singular of all plagiarism is possibly that of Father Barre, author of a large history of Germany in ten volumes. The history of Charles XII. had just been printed, and he inserted more than two hundred pages of it in his work; making a duke of Lorraine say precisely that which was said by Charles XII.
He attributes to the emperor Arnold that which happened to the Swedish monarch. He relates of the emperor Rudolph that which was said of King Stanislaus. Waldemar, king of Denmark, acts precisely like Charles at Bender, etc.
The most pleasant part of the story is, that a journalist, perceiving this extraordinary resemblance between the two works, failed not to impute the plagiarism to the author of the history of Charles XII., who had composed his work twenty years before the appearance of that of Father Barre. It is chiefly in poetry that plagiarism is allowed to pass; and certainly, of all larcenies, it is that which is least dangerous to society.
The fathers of the Church, of the first four centuries, were all Greeks and Platonists: you find not one Roman who wrote for Christianity, or who had the slightest tincture of philosophy. I will here observe, by the way, that it is strange enough, the great Church of Rome, which contributed in nothing to this establishment, has alone reaped all the advantage. It has been with this revolution, as with all those produced by civil wars: the first who trouble a state, always unknowingly labor for others rather than for themselves.
The school of Alexandria, founded by one named Mark, to whom succeeded Athenagoras, Clement, and Origen, was the centre of the Christian philosophy. Plato was regarded by all the Greeks of Alexandria as the master of wisdom, the interpreter of the divinity. If the first Christians had not embraced the dogmas of Plato, they would never have had any philosophers, any man of mind in their party. I set aside inspiration and grace which are above all philosophy, and speak only of the ordinary course of human events.
It is said that it was principally in the "Timæus" of Plato that the Greek fathers were instructed. This "Timæus" passes for the most sublime work of all ancient philosophy. It is almost the only one which Dacier has not translated, and I think the reason is, because he did not understand it, and that he feared to discover to clear-sighted readers the face of this Greek divinity, who is only adored because he is veiled.
Plato, in this fine dialogue, commences by introducing an Egyptian priest, who teaches Solon the ancient history of the city of Athens, which was preserved faithfully for nine thousand years in the archives of Egypt.
Athens, says the priest, was once the finest city of Greece, and the most renowned in the world for the arts of war and peace. She alone resisted the warriors of the famous island Atlantis, who came in innumerable vessels to subjugate a great part of Europe and Asia. Athens had the glory of freeing so many vanquished people, and of preserving Egypt from the servitude which menaced us. But after this illustrious victory and service rendered to mankind, a frightful earthquake in twenty-four hours swallowed the territory of Athens, and all the great island of Atlantis. This island is now only a vast sea, which the ruins of this ancient world and the slime mixed with its waters rendered unnavigable.
This is what the priest relates to Solon: and such is the manner in which Plato prepares to explain to us subsequently, the formation of the soul, the operations of the "Word," and his trinity. It is not physically impossible that there might be an island Atlantis, which had not existed for nine thousand years, and which perished by an earthquake, like Herculaneum and so many other cities; but our priest, in adding that the sea which washes Mount Atlas is inaccessible to vessels, renders the history a little suspicious.
It may be, after all, that since Solon—that is to say, in the course of three thousand years—vessels have dispersed the slime of the ancient island Atlantis and rendered the sea navigable; but it is still surprising that he should prepare by this island to speak of the "Word."
Perhaps in telling this priest's or old woman's story, Plato wished to insinuate something contrary to the vicissitudes which have so often changed the face of the globe. Perhaps he would merely say what Pythagoras and Timæus of Locris have said so long before him, and what our eyes tell us every day—that everything in nature perishes and is renewed. The history of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the fall of Phæthon, are fables: but inundations and conflagrations are truths.
Plato departs from his imaginary island, to speak of things which the best of philosophers of our days would not disavow. "That which is produced has necessarily a cause, an author. It is difficult to discover the author of this world; and when he is found it is dangerous to speak of him to the people."
Nothing is more true, even now, than that if a sage, in passing by our Lady of Loretto, said to another sage, his friend, that our Lady of Loretto, with her little black face, governs not the entire universe, and a good woman overheard these words, and related them to other good women of the march of Ancona, the sage would be stoned like Orpheus. This is precisely the situation in which the first Christians were believed to be, who spoke not well of Cybele and Diana, which alone should attach them to Plato. The unintelligible things which he afterwards treats of, ought not to disgust us with him.
I will not reproach Plato with saying, in his "Timæus," that the world is an animal; for he no doubt understands that the elements in motion animate the world; and he means not, by animal, a dog or a man, who walks, feels, eats, sleeps, and engenders. An author should always be explained in the most favorable sense; and it is not while we accuse people, or when we denounce their books, that it is right to interpret malignantly and poison all their words; nor is it thus that I shall treat Plato.
According to him there is a kind of trinity which is the soul of matter. These are his words: "From the indivisible substance, always similar to itself, and the divisible substance, a third substance is composed, which partakes of the same and of others."
Afterwards came the Pythagorean number, which renders the thing still more unintelligible, and consequently more respectable. What ammunition for people commencing a paper war! Friend reader, a little patience and attention, if you please: "When God had formed the soul of the world of these three substances, the soul shot itself into the midst of the universe, to the extremities of being; spreading itself everywhere, and reacting upon itself, it formed at all times a divine origin of eternal wisdom."
And some lines afterwards: "Thus the nature of the immense animal which we callthe world,is eternal." Plato, following the example of his predecessors, then introduces the Supreme Being, the Creator of the world, forming this world before time; so that God could not exist without the world, nor the world without God; as the sun cannot exist without shedding light into space, nor this light steal into space without the sun.
I pass in silence many Greek, or rather Oriental ideas; as for example—that there are four sorts of animals—celestial gods, birds of the air, fishes, and terrestrial animals, to which last we have the honor to belong.
I hasten to arrive at a second trinity: "the being engendered, the being who engenders, and the being which resembles the engendered and the engenderer." This trinity is formal enough, and the fathers have found their account in it.
This trinity is followed by a rather singular theory of the four elements. The earth is founded on an equilateral triangle, water on a right-angled triangle, air on a scalene, and fire on an isosceles triangle. After which he demonstratively proves that there can be but five worlds, because there are but five regular solid bodies, and yet that there is but one world which is round.
I confess that no philosopher in Bedlam has ever reasoned so powerfully. Rouse yourself, friend reader, to hear me speak of the other famous trinity of Plato, which his commentators have so much vaunted: it is the Eternal Being, the Eternal Creator of the world; His word, intelligence, or idea; and the good which results from it. I assure you that I have sought for it diligently in this "Timæus," and I have never found it there; it may be there "totidem literis," but it is not "totidem verbis," or I am much mistaken.
After reading all Plato with great reluctance, I perceived some shadow of the trinity for which he is so much honored. It is in the sixth book of his "Chimerical Republic," in which he says: "Let us speak of the Son, the wonderful production of good, and His perfect image." But unfortunately he discovers this perfect image of God to be the sun. It was therefore the physical sun, which with the Word and the Father composed the platonic trinity. In the "Epinomis" of Plato there are very curious absurdities, one of which I translate as reasonably as I can, for the convenience of the reader:
"Know that there are eight virtues in heaven: I have observed them, which is easy to all the world. The sun is one of its virtues, the moon another; the third is the assemblage of stars; and the five planets, with these three virtues, make the number eight. Be careful of thinking that these virtues, or those which they contain, and which animate them, either move of themselves or are carried in vehicles; be careful, I say, of believing that some may be gods and others not; that some may be adorable, and others such as we should neither adore or invoke. They are all brothers; each has his share; we owe them all the same honors; they fill all the situations which the Word assigned to them, when it formed the visible universe."
Here is the Word already found: we must now find the three persons. They are in the second letter from Plato to Dionysius, which letters assuredly are not forged; the style is the same as that of his dialogues. He often says to Dionysius and Dion things very difficult to comprehend, and which we might believe to be written in numbers, but he also tells us very clear ones, which have been found true a long time after him. For example, he expresses himself thus in his seventh letter to Dion:
"I have been convinced that all states are very badly governed; there is scarcely any good institution or administration. We see, as it were, day after day, that all follow the path of fortune rather than that of wisdom." After this short digression on temporal affairs, let us return to spiritual ones, to the Trinity. Plato says to Dionysius:
"The King of the universe is surrounded by His works: all is the effect of His grace. The finest of things have their first cause in Him; the second in perfection have in Him their second cause, and He is further the third cause of works of the third degree."
The Trinity, such as we acknowledge, could not be recognized in this letter; but it was a great point to have in a Greek author a guaranty of the dogmas of the dawning Church. Every Greek church was therefore Platonic, as every Latin church was peripatetic, from the commencement of the third century. Thus two Greeks whom we have never understood, were the masters of our opinions until the time in which men at the end of two thousand years were obliged to think for themselves.
Plato, in saying to the Greeks what so many philosophers of other nations have said before him, in assuring them that there is a Supreme Intelligence which arranged the universe—did he think that this Supreme Intelligence resided in a single place, like a king of the East in his seraglio? Or rather did he believe that this Powerful Intelligence spread itself everywhere like light, or a being still more delicate, prompt, active, and penetrating than light? The God of Plato, in a word, is he in matter, or is he separated from it? Oh, you who have read Plato attentively, that is to say, seven or eight fantastical dreams hidden in some garret in Europe, if ever these questions reach you, I implore you to answer them.
The barbarous island of Cassite rides, in which men lived in the woods in the time of Plato, has finally produced philosophers who are as much beyond him as Plato was beyond those of his contemporaries who reasoned not at all. Among these philosophers, Clarke is perhaps altogether the clearest, the most profound, the most methodical, and the strongest of all those who have spoken of the Supreme Being.
When he gave his excellent book to the public he found a young gentleman of the county of Gloucester who candidly advanced objections as strong as his demonstrations. We can see them at the end of the first volume of Clarke; it was not on the necessary existence of the Supreme Being that he reasoned; it was on His infinity and immensity.
It appears not indeed, that Clarke has proved that there is a being who penetrates intimately all which exists, and that this being whose properties we cannot conceive has the property of extending Himself to the greatest imaginable distance.
The great Newton has demonstrated that there is a void in nature; but what philosopher could demonstrate to me that God is in this void; that He touches it; that He fills it? How, bounded as we are, can we attain to the knowledge of these mysteries? Does it not suffice, that it proves to us that a Supreme Master exists? It is not given to us to know what He is nor how He is.
It seems as if Locke and Clarke had the keys of the intelligible world. Locke has opened all the apartments which can be entered; but has not Clarke wished to penetrate a little above the edifice? How could a philosopher like Samuel Clarke, after so admirable a work on the existence of God, write so pitiable a one on matters of fact?
How could Benedict Spinoza, who had as much profundity of mind as Samuel Clarke, after raising himself to the most sublime metaphysics, how could he not perceive that a Supreme Intelligence presides over works visibly arranged with a supreme intelligence—if it is true after all that such is the system of Spinoza?
How could Newton, the greatest of men, comment upon the Apocalypse, as we have already remarked? How could Locke, after having so well developed the human understanding, degrade his own in another work? I fancy I see eagles, who after darting into a cloud go to rest on a dunghill.
A young man on leaving college deliberates whether he shall be an advocate, a physician, a theologian, or a poet—whether he shall take care of our body, our soul, or our entertainment. We have already spoken of advocates and physicians; we will now speak of the prodigious fortune which is sometimes made by the theologian.
The theologian becomes pope, and has not only his theological valets, cooks, singers, chamberlains, physicians, surgeons, sweepers,agnus deimakers, confectioners, and preachers, but also his poet. I know not what inspired personage was the poet of Leo X., as David was for some time the poet of Saul.
It is surely of all the employments in a great house, that which is the most useless. The kings of England, who have preserved in their island many of the ancient usages which are lost on the continent, have their official poet. He is obliged once a year to make an ode in praise of St. Cecilia, who played so marvellously on the organ or psalterium that an angel descended from the ninth heaven to listen to her more conveniently—the harmony of the psaltery, in ascending from this place to the land of angels, necessarily losing a small portion of its volume.
Moses is the first poet that we know of; but it is thought that before him the Chaldæans, the Syrians, and the Indians practised poetry, since they possessed music. Nevertheless, the fine canticle which Moses chanted with his sister Miriam, when they came out of the Red Sea, is the most ancient poetical monument in hexameter verse that we possess. I am not of the opinion of those impious and ignorant rogues, Newton, Le Clerc, and others, who prove that all this was written about eight hundred years after the event, and who insolently maintain that Moses could not write in Hebrew, since Hebrew is only a comparatively modern dialect of the Phœnician, of which Moses could know nothing at all. I examine not with the learned Huet how Moses was able to sing so well, who stammered and could not speak.
If we listened to many of these authors, Moses would be less ancient than Orpheus, Musæus, Homer, and Hesiod. We perceive at the first glance the absurdity of this opinion; as if a Greek could be an ancient as a Jew!
Neither will I reply to those impertinent persons who suspect that Moses is only an imaginary personage, a fabulous imitation of the fable of the ancient Bacchus; and that all the prodigies of Bacchus, since attributed to Moses, were sung in orgies before it was known that Jews existed in the world. This idea refutes itself; it is obvious to good sense that it is impossible that Bacchus could have existed before Moses.
We have still, however, an excellent Jewish poet undeniably anterior to Horace—King David; and we know well how infinitely superior the "Miserere," is to the "Justum ac tenacem propositi virum." But what is most astonishing, legislators and kings have been our earliest poets. We find even at present people so good as to become poets for kings. Virgil indeed had not the office of poet to Augustus, nor Lucan that of poet to Nero; but I confess that it would have debased the profession not a little to make gods of either the one or the other.
It is asked, why poetry, being so unnecessary to the world, occupies so high a rank among the fine arts? The same question may be put with regard to music. Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all of great and of feeling souls. One merit of poetry few persons will deny; it says more and in fewer words than prose. Who was ever able to translate the following Latin words with the brevity with which they came from the brain of the poet: "Vive memor lethi, fugit hora, hoc quod loquor inde est?"
I speak not of the other charms of poetry, as they are well known; but I insist upon the grand precept of Horace, "Sapere est principium et fons." There can be no great poetry without great wisdom; but how connect this wisdom with enthusiasm, like Cæsar, who formed his plan of battle with circumspection, and fought with all possible ardor?
There have no doubt been ignorant poets, but then they have been bad poets. A man acquainted only with dactyls and spondees, and with a head full of rhymes, is rarely a man of sense; but Virgil is endowed with superior reason.
Lucretius, in common with all the ancients, was miserably ignorant of physical laws, a knowledge of which is not to be acquired by wit. It is a knowledge which is only to be obtained by instruments, which in his time had not been invented. Glasses are necessary—microscopes, pneumatic machines, barometers, etc., to have even a distant idea of the operations of nature.
Descartes knew little more than Lucretius, when his keys opened the sanctuary; and an hundred times more of the path has been trodden from the time of Galileo, who was better instructed physically than Descartes, to the present day, than from the first Hermes to Lucretius.
All ancient physics are absurd: it was not thus with the philosophy of mind, and that good sense which, assisted by strength of intellect, can acutely balance between doubts and appearances. This is the chief merit of Lucretius; his third book is a masterpiece of reasoning. He argues like Cicero, and expresses himself like Virgil; and it must be confessed that when our illustrious Polignac attacked his third book, he refuted it only like a cardinal.
When I say, that Lucretius reasons in his third book like an able metaphysician, I do not say that he was right. We may argue very soundly, and deceive ourselves, if not instructed by revelation. Lucretius was not a Jew, and we know that Jews alone were in the right in the days of Cicero, of Posidonius, of Cæsar, and of Cato. Lastly, under Tiberius, the Jews were no longer in the right, and common sense was possessed by the Christians exclusively.
Thus it was impossible that Lucretius, Cicero, and Cæsar could be anything but imbecile, in comparison with the Jews and ourselves; but it must be allowed that in the eyes of the rest of the world they were very great men. I allow that Lucretius killed himself, as also did Cato, Cassius, and Brutus, but they might very well kill themselves, and still reason like men of intellect during their lives.
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works. Racine wrote like Virgil, but he became Jansenist through weakness, and he died in consequence of weakness equally great—because a man in passing through a gallery did not bestow a look upon him. I am very sorry for all this; but the part of Phædra is not therefore the less admirable.
Let us often repeat useful truths. There have always been fewer poisonings than have been spoken of: it is almost with them as with parricides; the accusations have been very common, and the crimes very rare. One proof is, that we have a long time taken for poison that which is not so. How many princes have got rid of those who were suspected by them by making them drink bullock's blood! How many other princes have swallowed it themselves to avoid falling into the hands of their enemies! All ancient historians, and even Plutarch, attest it.
I was so infatuated with these tales in my childhood that I bled one of my bulls, in the idea that his blood belonged to me, since he was born in my stable—an ancient pretension of which I will not here dispute the validity. I drank this blood, like Atreus and Mademoiselle de Vergi, and it did me no more harm than horse's blood does to the Tartars, or pudding does to us every day, if it be not too rich.
Why should the blood of a bull be a poison, when that of a goat is considered a remedy? The peasants of my province swallow the blood of a cow, which they call fricassée, every day; that of a bull is not more dangerous. Be sure, dear reader, that Themistocles died not of it.
Some speculators of the court of Louis XIV. believed they discovered that his sister-in-law, Henrietta of England, was poisoned with powder of diamonds, which was put into a bowl of strawberries, instead of grated sugar; but neither the impalpable powder of glass or diamonds, nor that of any production of nature which was not in itself venomous, could be hurtful.
They are only sharp-cutting active points which can become violent. The exact observer, Mead, a celebrated English physician, saw through a microscope the liquor shot from the gums of irritated vipers. He pretends that he has always found them strewn with these cutting, pointed blades, the immense number of which tear and pierce the internal membranes.
The cantarella, of which it is pretended that Pope Alexander VI. and his bastard, the duke of Borgia, made great use, was, it is said, the foam of a hog rendered furious by suspending him by the feet with his head downwards, in which situation he was beaten to death; it was a poison as prompt and violent as that of the viper. A great apothecary assures me that Madame la Tofana, that celebrated poisoner of Naples, principally made use of this receipt; all which is perhaps untrue. This science is one of those of which we should be ignorant.
Poisons which coagulate the blood, instead of tearing the membranes, are opium, hemlock, henbane, aconite, and several others. The Athenians became so refined as to cause their countrymen, condemned to death, to die by poisons reputed cold; an apothecary was the executioner of the republic. It is said that Socrates died very peacefully, and as if he slept: I can scarcely believe it.
I made one remark on the Jewish books, which is, that among this people we see no one who was poisoned. A crowd of kings and priests perished by assassination; the history of the nation is the history of murders and robberies; but a single instance only is mentioned of a man who was poisoned, and this man was not a Jew—he was a Syrian named Lysias, general of the armies of Antiochus Epiphanes. The second Book of Maccabees says that he poisoned himself—"veneno vitam finivit;" but these Books of Maccabees are very suspicious. My dear reader, I have already desired you to believe nothing lightly.
What astonishes me most in the history of the manners of the ancient Romans is the conspiracy of the Roman women to cause to perish by poison, not only their husbands, but the principal citizens in general. "It was," says Titus Livius, "in the year 423 from the foundation of Rome, and therefore in the time of the most austere virtue; it was before there was any mention of divorce, though divorce was authorized; it was when women drank no wine, and scarcely ever went out of their houses, except to the temples." How can we imagine, that they suddenly applied themselves to the knowledge of poisons; that they assembled to compose them; and, without any apparent interest, thus administered death to the first men in Rome?
Lawrence Echard, in his abridged compilation, contents himself with saying, that "the virtue of the Roman ladies was strangely belied; that one hundred and seventy who meddled with the art of making poisons, and of reducing this art into precepts, were all at once accused, convicted, and punished." Titus Livius assuredly does not say that they reduced this art into rules. That would signify that they held a school of poisons, that they professed it as a science; which is ridiculous. He says nothing about a hundred and seventy professors in corrosive sublimate and verdigris. Finally, he does not affirm that there were poisoners among the wives of the senators and knights.
The people were extremely foolish, and reasoned at Rome as elsewhere. These are the words of Titus Livius: "The year 423 was of the number of unfortunate ones; there was a mortality caused by the temperature of the air or by human malice. I wish that we could affirm with some author that the corruption of the air caused this epidemic, rather than attribute the death of so many Romans to poison, as many historians have falsely written, to decry this year."
They have therefore written falsely, according to Titus Livius, who believes not that the ladies of Rome were poisoners: but what interest had authors in decrying this year? I know not.
"I relate the fact," continues he, "as it was related before me." This is not the speech of a satisfied man; besides, the alleged fact much resembles a fable. A slave accuses about seventy women, among whom are several of the patrician rank, of causing the plague in Rome by preparing poisons. Some of the accused demand permission to swallow their drugs, and expire on the spot; and their accomplices are condemned to death without the manner of their punishment being specified.
I suspect that this story to which Titus Livius gives no credit, deserves to be banished to the place in which the vessel is preserved which a vestal drew to shore with a girdle; where Jupiter in person stopped the flight of the Romans; where Castor and Pollux came to combat on horseback in their behalf; where a flint was cut with a razor; and where Simon Barjonas, surnamed Peter, disputed miracles with Simon the magician.
There is scarcely any poison of which we cannot prevent the consequences by combating it immediately. There is no medicine which is not a poison when taken in too strong a dose. All indigestion is a poison. An ignorant physician, and even a learned but inattentive one, is often a poisoner. A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.
One day the marquis d'Argenson, minister of state for the foreign department, whilst his brother was minister of war, received from London a letter from a fool—as ministers do by every post; this fool proposed an infallible means of poisoning all the inhabitants of the capital of England. "This does not concern me," said the marquis d'Argenson to us; "it is a packet to my brother."
The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter. To attain this state is a matter of no little time and difficulty. How to procure for himself subsistence and accommodation, and protect himself from evil, comprises the whole object and business of man.
This evil exists everywhere; the four elements of nature conspire to form it. The barrenness of one-quarter part of the world, the numberless diseases to which we are subject, the multitude of strong and hostile animals by which we are surrounded, oblige us to be constantly on the alert in body and in mind, to guard against the various forms of evil.
No man, by his own individual care and exertion, can secure himself from evil; he requires assistance. Society therefore is as ancient as the world. This society consists sometimes of too many, and sometimes of too few. The vicissitudes of the world have often destroyed whole races of men and other animals, in many countries, and have multiplied them in others.
To enable a species to multiply, a tolerable climate and soil are necessary; and even with these advantages, men may be under the necessity of going unclothed, of suffering hunger, of being destitute of everything, and of perishing in misery.
Men are not like beavers, or bees, or silk-worms; they have no sure and infallible instinct which procures for them necessaries. Among a hundred men, there is scarcely one that possesses genius; and among women, scarcely one among five hundred.
It is only by means of genius that those arts are invented, which eventually furnish something of that accommodation which is the great object of all policy.
To attempt these arts with success, the assistance of others is requisite; hands to aid you, and minds sufficiently acute and unprejudiced to comprehend you, and sufficiently docile to obey you. Before, however, all this can be discovered and brought together, thousands of years roll on in ignorance and barbarism; thousands of efforts for improvement terminate only in abortion. At length, the outlines of an art are formed, but thousands of ages are still requisite to carry it to perfection.
Foreign Policy.
When any one nation has become acquainted with metallurgy, it will certainly beat its neighbors and make slaves of them. You possess arrows and sabres, and were born in a climate that has rendered you robust. We are weak, and have only clubs and stones. You kill us, or if you permit us to live, it is that we may till your fields and build your houses. We sing some rustic ditty to dissipate your spleen or animate your languor, if we have any voice; or we blow on some pipes, in order to obtain from you clothing and bread. If our wives and daughters are handsome, you appropriate them without scruple to yourselves. The young gentleman, your son, not only takes advantage of the established policy, but adds new discoveries to this growing art. His servants proceed, by his orders, to emasculate my unfortunate boys, whom he then honors with the guardianship of his wives and mistresses. Such has been policy, the great art of making mankind contribute to individual advantage and enjoyment; and such is still policy throughout the largest portion of Asia.
Some nations, or rather hordes, having thus by superior strength and skill brought into subjection others, begin afterwards to fight with one another for the division of the spoil. Each petty nation maintains and pays soldiers. To encourage, and at the same time to control these soldiers, each possesses its gods, its oracles, and prophecies; each maintains and pays its soothsayers and slaughtering priests. These soothsayers or augurs begin with prophesying in favor of the heads of the nation; they afterwards prophesy for themselves and obtain a share in the government. The most powerful and shrewd prevail at last over the others, after ages of carnage which excite our horror, and of impostures which excite our laughter. Such is the regular course and completion of policy.
While these scenes of ravage and fraud are carried on in one portion of the globe, other nations, or rather clans, retire to mountain caverns, or districts surrounded by inaccessible swamps, marshes, or some verdant and solitary spot in the midst of vast deserts of burning sand, or some peninsular and consequently easily protected territory, to secure themselves against the tyrants of the continent. At length all become armed with nearly the same description of weapons; and blood flows from one extremity of the world to the other.
Men, however, cannot forever go on killing one another; and peace is consequently made, till either party thinks itself sufficiently strong to recommence the war. Those who can write draw up these treaties of peace; and the chiefs of every nation, with a view more successfully to impose upon their enemies, invoke the gods to attest with what sincerity they bind themselves to the observance of these compacts. Oaths of the most solemn character are invented and employed, and one party engages in the name of the great Somonocodom, and the other in that of Jupiter the Avenger, to live forever in peace and amity; while in the same names of Somonocodom and Jupiter, they take the first opportunity of cutting one another's throats.
In times of the greatest civilization and refinement, the lion of Æsop made a treaty with three animals, who were his neighbors. The object was to divide the common spoil into four equal parts. The lion, for certain incontestable and satisfactory reasons which he did not then deem it necessary to detail, but which he would be always ready to give in due time and place, first takes three parts out of the four for himself, and then threatens instant strangulation to whoever shall dare to touch the fourth. This is the true sublime of policy.
Internal Policy.
The object here is to accumulate for our own country the greatest quantity of power, honor, and enjoyment possible. To attain these in any extraordinary degree, much money is indispensable. In a democracy it is very difficult to accomplish this object. Every citizen is your rival; a democracy can never subsist but in a small territory. You may have wealth almost equal to your wishes through your own mercantile dealings, or transmitted in patrimony from your industrious and opulent grandfather; your fortune will excite jealousy and envy, but will purchase little real co-operation and service. If an affluent family ever bears sway in a democracy, it is not for a long time.
In an aristocracy, honors, pleasures, power, and money, are more easily obtainable. Great discretion, however, is necessary. If abuse is flagrant, revolution will be the consequence. Thus in a democracy all the citizens are equal. This species of government is at present rare, and appears to but little advantage, although it is in itself natural and wise. In aristocracy, inequality or superiority makes itself sensibly felt; but the less arrogant its demeanor, the more secure and successful will be its course.
Monarchy remains to be mentioned. In this, all mankind are made for one individual: he accumulates all honors with which he chooses to decorate himself, tastes all pleasures to which he feels an inclination, and exercises a power absolutely without control; provided, let it be remembered, that he has plenty of money. If he is deficient in that, he will be unsuccessful at home as well as abroad, and will soon be left destitute of power, pleasures, honors, and perhaps even of life.
While this personage has money, not only is he successful and happy himself, but his relations and principal servants are flourishing in full enjoyment also; and an immense multitude of hirelings labor for them the whole year round, in the vain hope that they shall themselves, some time or other, enjoy in their cottages the leisure and comfort which their sultans and pashas enjoy in their harems. Observe, however, what will probably happen.
A jolly, full-fed farmer was formerly in possession of a vast estate, consisting of fields, meadows, vineyards, orchards, and forests. A hundred laborers worked for him, while he dined with his family, drank his wine, and went to sleep. His principal domestics, who plundered him, dined next, and ate up nearly everything. Then came the laborers, for whom there was left only a very meagre and insufficient meal. They at first murmured, then openly complained, speedily lost all patience, and at last ate up the dinner prepared for their master, and turned him out of his house. The master said they were a set of scoundrels, a pack of undutiful and rebellious children who assaulted and abused their own father. The laborers replied that they had only obeyed the sacred law of nature, which he had violated. The dispute was finally referred to a soothsayer in the neighborhood, who was thought to be actually inspired. The holy man takes the farm into his own hands, and nearly famishes both the laborers and the master; till at length their feelings counteract their superstition, and the saint is in the end expelled in his turn. This is domestic policy.
There have been more examples than one of this description; and some consequences of this species of policy still subsist in all their strength. We may hope that in the course of ten or twelve thousand ages, when mankind become more enlightened, the great proprietors of estates, grown also more wise, will on the one hand treat their laborers rather better, and on the other take care not to be duped by soothsayers.
In quality of a doubter, I have a long time filled my vocation. I have doubted when they would persuade me, that theglossopetreswhich I have seen formed in my fields, were originally the tongues of sea-dogs, that the lime used in my barn was composed of shells only, that corals were the production of the excrement of certain little fishes, that the sea by its currents has formed Mount Cenis and Mount Taurus, and that Niobe was formerly changed into marble.
It is not that I love not the extraordinary, the marvellous, as well as any traveller or man of system; but to believe firmly, I would see with my own eyes, touch with my own hands, and that several times. Even that is not enough; I would still be aided by the eyes and hands of others.
Two of my companions, who, like myself, form questions on the "Encyclopædia," have for some time amused themselves with me in studying the nature of several of the little films which grow in ditches by the side of water lentils. These light herbs, which we call polypi of soft water, have several roots, from which circumstance we have given them the name of polypi. These little parasite plants were merely plants, until the commencement of the age in which we live. Leuenhoeck raises them to the rank of animals. We know not if they have gained much by it.
We think that, to be considered as an animal, it is necessary to be endowed with sensation. They therefore commence by showing us, that these soft water polypi have feeling, in order that we should present them with our right of citizenship.
We have not dared to grant it the dignity of sensation, though it appeared to have the greatest pretensions to it. Why should we give it to a species of small rush? Is it because it appears to bud? This property is common to all trees growing by the water-side; to willows, poplars, aspens, etc. It is so light, that it changes place at the least motion of the drop of water which bears it; thence it has been concluded that it walked. In like manner, we may suppose that the little, floating, marshy islands of St. Omer are animals, for they often change their place.
It is said its roots are its feet, its stalk its body, its branches are its arms; the pipe which composes its stalk is pierced at the top—it is its mouth. In this pipe there is a light white pith, of which some almost imperceptible animalcules are very greedy; they enter the hollow of this little pipe by making it bend, and eat this light paste;—it is the polypus who captures these animals with his snout, though it has not the least appearance of head, mouth, or stomach.
We have examined this sport of nature with all the attention of which we are capable. It appeared to us that the production called polypus resembled an animal much less than a carrot or asparagus. In vain we have opposed to our eyes all the reasonings which we formerly read; the evidence of our eyes has overthrown them. It is a pity to lose an illusion. We know how pleasant it would be to have an animal which could reproduce itself by offshoots, and which, having all the appearances of a plant, could join the animal to the vegetable kingdom.
It would be much more natural to give the rank of an animal to the newly-discovered plant of Anglo-America, to which the pleasant name of Venus' fly-trap has been given. It is a kind of prickly sensitive-plant, the leaves of which fold of themselves; the flies are taken in these leaves and perish there more certainly than in the web of a spider. If any of our physicians would call this plant an animal, he would have partisans.
But if you would have something more extraordinary, more worthy of the observation of philosophers, observe the snail, which lives one and two whole months after its head is cut off, and which afterwards has a second head, containing all the organs possessed by the first. This truth, to which all children can be witnesses, is more worthy than the illusion of polypi of soft water. What becomes of its sensorium, its magazine of ideas, and soul, when its head is cut off? How do all these return? A soul which is renewed is a very curious phenomenon; not that it is more strange than a soul begotten, a soul which sleeps and awakes, or a condemned soul.
The plurality of gods is the great reproach at present cast upon the Greeks and Romans: but let any man show me, if he can, a single fact in the whole of their histories, or a single word in the whole of their books, from which it may be fairly inferred that they believed in many supreme gods; and if neither that fact nor word can be found, if, on the contrary, all antiquity is full of monuments and records which attest one sovereign God, superior to all other gods, let us candidly admit that we have judged the ancients as harshly as we too often judge our contemporaries.
We read in numberless passages that Zeus, Jupiter, is the master of gods and men. "Jovis omnia plena."—"All things are full of Jupiter." And St. Paul gives this testimony in favor of the ancients: "In ipso vivimus, movemur, et sumus, ut quidam vestrorum poetarum dixit."—"In God we live, and move, and have our being, as one of your own poets has said." After such an acknowledgment as this, how can we dare to accuse our instructors of not having recognized a supreme God?
We have no occasion whatever to examine upon this subject, whether there was formerly a Jupiter who was king of Crete, and who may possibly have been considered and ranked as a god; or whether the Egyptians had twelve superior gods, or eight, among whom the deity called Jupiter by the Latins might be one. The single point to be investigated and ascertained here is, whether the Greeks and Romans acknowledged one celestial being as the master or sovereign of other celestial beings. They constantly tell us that they do; and we ought therefore to believe them.
The admirable letter of the philosopher Maximus of Madaura to St. Augustine is completely to our purpose: "There is a God," says he, "without any beginning, the common Father of all, but who never produced a being like Himself. What man is so stupid and besotted as to doubt it?" Such is the testimony of a pagan of the fourth century on behalf of all antiquity.
Were I inclined to lift the veil that conceals the mysteries of Egypt, I should find the deity adored under the name of Knef, who produced all things and presides over all the other deities; I should discover also a Mithra among the Persians, and a Brahma among the Indians, and could perhaps show, that every civilized nation admitted one supreme being, together with a multitude of dependent divinities. I do not speak of the Chinese, whose government, more respectable than all the rest, has acknowledged one God only for a period of more than four thousand years. Let us here confine ourselves to the Greeks and Romans, who are the objects of our immediate researches. They had among them innumerable superstitions—it is impossible to doubt it; they adopted fables absolutely ridiculous—everybody knows it; and I may safely add, that they were themselves sufficiently disposed to ridicule them. After all, however, the foundation of their theology was conformable to reason.
In the first place, with respect to the Greeks placing heroes in heaven as a reward for their virtues, it was one of the most wise and useful of religious institutions. What nobler recompense could possibly be bestowed upon them; what more animating and inspiring hope could be held out to them? Is it becoming that we, above all others, should censure such a practice—we who, enlightened by the truth, have piously consecrated the very usage which the ancients imagined? We have a far greater number of the blessed in honor of whom we have created altars, than the Greeks and Romans had of heroes and demi-gods; the difference is, that they granted the apotheosis to the most illustrious and resplendent actions, and we grant it to the most meek and retired virtues. But their deified heroes never shared the throne of Jupiter, the great architect, the eternal sovereign of the universe; they were admitted to his court and enjoyed his favors. What is there unreasonable in this? Is it not a faint shadow and resemblance of the celestial hierarchy presented to us by our religion? Nothing can be of a more salutary moral tendency than such an idea; and the reality is not physically impossible in itself. We have surely, upon this subject, no fair ground for ridiculing nations to whom we are indebted even for our alphabet.
The second object of our reproaches, is the multitude of gods admitted to the government of the world; Neptune presiding over the sea, Juno over the air, Æolus over the winds, and Pluto or Vesta over the earth, and Mars over armies. We set aside the genealogies of all these divinities, which are as false as those which are every day fabricated and printed respecting individuals among ourselves; we pass sentence of condemnation on all their light and loose adventures, worthy of being recorded in the pages of the "Thousand and One Nights," and which never constituted the foundation or essence of the Greek and Roman faith; but let us at the same time candidly ask, where is the folly and stupidity of having adopted beings of a secondary order, who, whatever they may be in relation to the great supreme, have at least some power over our very differently-constituted race, which, instead of belonging to the second, belongs perhaps to the hundred thousandth order of existence? Does this doctrine necessarily imply either bad metaphysics or bad natural philosophy? Have we not ourselves nine choirs of celestial spirits, more ancient than mankind? Has not each of these choirs a peculiar name? Did not the Jews take the greater number of these names from the Persians? Have not many angels their peculiar functions assigned them? There was an exterminating angel, who fought for the Jews, and the angel of travellers, who conducted Tobit. Michael was the particular angel of the Hebrews; and, according to Daniel, he fights against the angel of the Persians, and speaks to the angel of the Greeks. An angel of inferior rank gives an account to Michael, in the book of Zachariah, of the state in which he had found the country. Every nation possessed its angel; the version of the Seventy Days, in Deuteronomy, that the Lord allotted the nations according to the number of angels. St. Paul, in the Acts of the Apostles, talks to the angel of Macedonia. These celestial spirits are frequently called gods in Scripture,Eloim.For among all nations, the word that corresponds with that of Theos, Deus, Dieu, God, by no means universally signifies the Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth; it frequently signifies a celestial being, a being superior to man, but dependent upon the great Sovereign of Nature; and it is sometimes bestowed even on princes and judges.
Since to us it is a matter of truth and reality, that celestial substances actually exist, who are intrusted with the care of men and empires, the people who have admitted this truth without the light of revelation are more worthy of our esteem than our contempt.
The ridicule, therefore, does not attach to polytheism itself, but to the abuse of it; to the popular fables of superstition; to the multitude of absurd divinities which have been supposed to exist and to the number of which every individual might add at his pleasure.
The goddess of nipples, "dea Rumilia"; the goddess of conjugal union, "dea Pertunda"; the god of the water-closet, "deus Stercutius"; the god of flatulence, "deus Crepitus"; are certainly not calculated to attract the highest degree of veneration. These ridiculous absurdities, the amusement of the old women and children of Rome, merely prove that the worddeushad acceptations of a widely different nature. Nothing can be more certain or obvious, than that the god of flatulence, "deus Crepitus," could never excite the same idea asdeus divûm et hominum sator,the source of gods and men. The Roman pontiffs did not admit the little burlesque and baboon-looking deities which silly women introduced into their cabinets. The Roman religion was in fact, in its intrinsic character, both serious and austere. Oaths were inviolable; war could not be commenced before the college of heralds had declared it just; and a vestal convicted of having violated her vow of virginity, was condemned to death. These circumstances announce a people inclined to austerities, rather than a people volatile, frivolous, and addicted to ridicule.
I confine myself here to showing that the senate did not reason absurdly in adopting polytheism. It is asked, how that senate, to two or three deputies from which we were indebted both for chains and laws, could permit so many extravagances among the people, and authorize so many fables among the pontiffs? It would be by no means difficult to answer this question. The wise have in every age made use of fools. They freely leave to the people their lupercals and their saturnalia, if they only continue loyal and obedient; and the sacred pullets that promised victory to the armies, are judiciously secured against the sacrilege of being slaughtered for the table. Let us never be surprised at seeing, that the most enlightened governments have permitted customs and fables of the most senseless character. These customs and fables existed before government was formed; and no one would pull down an immense city, however irregular in its buildings, to erect it precisely according to line and level.
How can it arise, we are asked, that on one side we see so much philosophy and science, and on the other so much fanaticism? The reason is, that science and philosophy were scarcely born before Cicero, and that fanaticism reigned for centuries. Policy, in such circumstances, says to philosophy and fanaticism: Let us all three live together as well as we can.
PAPIST.—His highness has within his principality Lutherans, Calvinists, Quakers, Anabaptists, and even Jews; and you wish that he would admit Unitarians?
TREASURER.—Certainly, if these Unitarians bring with them wealth and industry. You will only be the better paid your wages.
PAPIST.—I must confess that a diminution of my wages would be more disagreeable to me than the admission of these persons; but, then, they do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
TREASURER.—What does that signify to you, provided that you are permitted to believe it, and are well lodged, well clothed, and well fed? The Jews are far from believing that He is the Son of God, and yet you are very easy with the Jews, with whom you deposit your money at six per cent. St. Paul himself has never spoken of the divinity of Jesus Christ, who is undisguisedly called a man. Death, says he, entered into the world by the sin of one man ... and by one man, Jesus Christ, the gift of grace hath abounded unto many, etc. All the early fathers of the Church thought like Paul. It is evident that, for three hundred years, Jesus was content with His humanity; imagine yourself a Christian of one of the first three centuries.
PAPIST.—Yes, sir; but neither do they believe in eternal punishments.
TREASURER.—Nor I either; be you damned eternally if you please; for my own part, I do not look for that advantage.
PAPIST.—Ah, sir! it is very hard not to be able to damn at pleasure all the heretics in the world; but the rage which the Unitarian displays for rendering everybody finally happy is not my only complaint. Know, that these monsters believe the resurrection of the body no more than the Sadducees. They say, that we are all anthropophagi, and that the particles which compose our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, having been necessarily dispersed in the atmosphere, become carrots and asparagus, and that it is possible we may have devoured a portion of our ancestors.
TREASURER.—Be it so; our children will do as much by us; it is but repayment, and Papists will be as much benefited as others. This is no reason for driving you from the states of his highness; and why any more so for ejecting the Unitarians? Rise again, if you are able; it matters little whether the Unitarians rise again or no, provided they are useful during their lives.
PAPIST.—And what, sir, do you say to original sin, which they boldly deny? Are you not scandalized by their assertion, that the Pentateuch says not a word about it, that the bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, is the first who decidedly taught this dogma, although it is evidently indicated by St. Paul?
TREASURER.—Truly, if the Pentateuch does not mention it, that is not my fault. Why not add a text or two about original sin to the Old Testament, as it is said you have added on other subjects? I know nothing of these subtleties; it is my business only to pay you your stipend, when I have the money to do so.
There were very few caterpillars in my canton last year, and we killed nearly the whole of them. God has rendered them this year more numerous than the leaves. Is it not nearly thus with other animals, and above all with mankind? Famine, pestilence, death, and the two sister diseases which have visited us from Arabia and America, destroy the inhabitants of a province, and we are surprised at finding it abound with people a hundred years afterwards.
I admit that it is a sacred duty to people this world, and that all animals are stimulated by pleasure to fulfil this intention of the great Demiourgos. Why this inhabiting of the earth? and to what purpose form so many beings to devour one another, and the animal man to cut the throat of his fellow, from one end of the earth to the other? I am assured that I shall one day be in the possession of this secret, and in my character of an inquisitive man I exceedingly desire it.
It is clear that we ought to people the earth as much as we are able; even our health renders it necessary. The wise Arabians, the robbers of the desert, in the treaties which they made with travellers, always stipulated for girls. When they conquered Spain, they imposed a tribute of girls. The country of Media pays the Turks in girls. The buccaneers brought girls from Paris to the little island of which they took possession; and it is related that, at the fine spectacle with which Romulus entertained the Sabines, he stole from them three hundred girls.
I cannot conceive why the Jews, whom moreover I revere, killed everybody in Jericho, even to the girls; and why they say in the Psalms, that it will be sweet to massacre the infants at the mother's breast, without excepting even girls. All other people, whether Tartars, Cannibals, Teutons, or Celts, have always held girls in great request.
Owing to this happy instinct, it seems that the earth may one day be covered with animals of our own kind. Father Petau makes the inhabitants of the earth seven hundred millions, two hundred and eighty years after the deluge. It is not, however, at the end of the "Arabian Nights" that he has printed this pleasant enumeration.
I reckon at present on our globe about nine hundred millions of contemporaries, and an equal number of each sex. Wallace makes them a thousand millions. Am I in error, or is he? Possibly both of us; but a tenth is a small matter; the arithmetic of historians is usually much more erroneous.
I am somewhat surprised that the arithmetician Wallace, who extends the number of people at present existing to a thousand millions, should pretend in the same page, that in the year 966, after the creation, our forefathers amounted to sixteen hundred and ten millions.
In the first place, I wish the epoch of the creation to be clearly established; and as, in our western world, we have no less than eighty theories of this event, there will be some difficulty to hit on the correct one. In the second place, the Egyptians, the Chaldæans, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese, have all different calculations; and it is still more difficult to agree with them. Thirdly, why, in the nine hundred and sixty-sixth year of the world, should there be more people than there are at present?
To explain this absurdity, we are told that matters occurred otherwise than at present; that nature, being more vigorous, was better concocted and more prolific; and, moreover, that people lived longer. Why do they not add, that the sun was warmer, and the moon more beautiful.
We are told, that in the time of Cæsar, although men had begun to greatly degenerate, the world was like an ants' nest of bipeds; but that at present it is a desert. Montesquieu, who always exaggerates, and who sacrifices anything to an itching desire of displaying his wit, ventures to believe, and in his "Persian Letters" would have others believe, that there were thirty times as many people in the world in the days of Cæsar as at present.
Wallace acknowledges that this calculation made at random is too much; but for what reason? Because, before the days of Cæsar, the world possessed more inhabitants than during the most brilliant period of the Roman republic. He then ascends to the time of Semiramis, and if possible exaggerates more than Montesquieu.
Lastly, in conformity with the taste which is always attributed to the Holy Spirit for hyperbole, they fail not to instance the eleven hundred and sixty thousand men, who marched so fiercely under the standards of the great monarch, Josophat, or Jehosophat, king of the province of Judah. Enough, enough, Mr. Wallace; the Holy Spirit cannot deceive; but its agents and copyists have badly calculated and numbered. All your Scotland would not furnish eleven hundred thousand men to attend your sermons, and the kingdom of Judah was not a twentieth part of Scotland. See, again, what St. Jerome says of this poor Holy Land, in which he so long resided. Have you well calculated the quantity of money the great King Jehosophat must have possessed, to pay, feed, clothe, and arm eleven hundred thousand chosen men? But thus is history written.
Mr. Wallace returns from Jehosophat to Cæsar, and concludes, that since the time of this dictator of short duration, the world has visibly decreased in the number of its inhabitants. Behold, said he, the Swiss: according to the relation of Cæsar, they amounted to three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, when they so wisely quitted their country to seek their fortunes, like the Cimbri.
I wish by this example to recall those partisans into a little due consideration, who gift the ancients with such wonders in the way of generation, at the expense of the moderns. The canton of Berne alone, according to an accurate census, possesses a greater number of inhabitants than quitted the whole of Helvetia in the time of Cæsar. The human species is, therefore, doubled in Helvetia since that expedition.
I likewise believe, that Germany, France, and England are much better peopled now than at that time; and for this reason: I adduce the vast clearance of forests, the number of great towns built and increased during the last eight hundred years, and the number of arts which have originated in proportion. This I regard as a sufficient answer to the brazen declamation, repeated every day in books, in which truth is sacrificed to sallies, and which are rendered useless by their abundant wit.
"L'Ami des Hommes" says, that in the time of Cæsar fifty-two millions of men were assigned to Spain, which Strabo observes has always been badly peopled, owing to the interior being so deficient in water. Strabo is apparently right, and "L'Ami des Hommes" erroneous. But they scare us by asking what has become of the prodigious quantity of Huns, Alans, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Lombards, who spread like a torrent over Europe in the fifth century.