Chapter I. Of National Pride in General.

THERE is no passion more universal than Pride. It pervades all orders of society: from the throne to the cottage, every individual in some point or other conceives himself superior to the rest of his species, and looks down with contempt or haughty compassion on all who are placed beneath his ima­ginary superiority. Every nation contemplates itself through the medium of self-conceit, and draws conclusions to its own advantage, which individuals adopt to themselves with complacency, because they confound and interweave their private with their national character. The inhabitants of most countries, great or small, powerful or otherwise, value themselves upon a certain something, of which they believe themselves to be exclusively possessed, and are apt to view every thing that re­lates to this particular point of honour, both in themselves and others, with prejudice and prepos­session. [Page 42] Thus humility, which forbids ascribing to ourselves greater worth than we really possess, and equity, which enjoins us to bestow the tribute of praise wherever it is due, have with respect to the judgement passed by nations upon each other become antiquated virtues. A powerful state may overawe, may destroy the dependence of its weaker neighbour, but can never bring its inhabit­ants to be humble; every thing else may be taken away, but their good opinion of themselves will remain. The Doge of Genoa, who had the ho­nour of submissively begging pardon of the haughty Lewis the fourteenth in his palace at Versailles, for the trouble that Prince had been put to in bom­barding his native city, saw nothing, amidst all the splendour of that magnificent court, so worthy of admiration, as the Doge himself.

National advantages are either imaginary or real: in the former case, when a nation unjustly pretends to the possession of great advantages, its pride is arrogance; in the latter, the pride arising from the consciousness of possessing greater worth than others, when well founded, may be called a noble pride, which arrogance can never be; for that always implies an unjust, an overweening, pre­ference of ourselves. Self-esteem proceeds from a sense of our own imaginary or real perfections, con­tempt for others from a sense of their imaginary or [Page 43] real defects; and the union of these two sentiments in the mind, by the partial comparison which a na­tion makes between the advantages it possesses, or believes itself to possess, and the deficiencies of other countries in the same respects, begets nation­al pride.

The nature of my subject requires uncommon li­berality of sentiment, and the strictest regard to equity, to avoid giving any reasonable cause of com­plaint against me. It is an arduous and difficult undertaking to attack men in their tenderest point, to delineate with forcible strokes the foibles and ridiculous characteristics of the most considerable nations, and, penetrating through the exterior ap­pearances and prejudices of mankind, to lay before the reader a true picture of their actions and mo­tives, so as not to offend any one, and to steer at an equal distance between the opposite extremes of fawning flattery and wanton satire.

Misinterpretations, I am aware, can hardly be avoided. I may often appear to exemplify a nation­al foible by that which may have been remarkable in one of its individuals; yet to allege on that account that I draw general inferences from few and partial observations, or that I cast on a whole nation the odium resulting from the defects of a few persons, would be doing me injustice. I believe I have not [Page 44] offended any man of understanding; and the sensi­ble part of mankind in every country, I am sure, will not take umbrage at the exposure of the weak­nesses which tarnish the better qualities of its inha­bitants.

Illustrious characters of all professions are every where to be met with; and, in this work, I de­fend the just claims of all nations to common sense and a good understanding, against the selfish mo­nopoly which has been exercised by the vanity of a few. I esteem and love persons of merit of what­ever clime or religion, and glory in their regard; but this does not prevent my censuring as ridicu­lous whatever really is so among the generality of their countrymen: this remark may peculiarly be applied to what I say respecting the Spaniards. It would be to form from my writings a very im­proper idea of my real sentiments, and of the whole tenour of my life, to suppose that I entertain an aver­sion to the English, whom I hold to be the wor­thiest nation of the globe, notwithstanding the ill I have to say of them: amidst all my censures, I love the French, and highly respect many individu­als among them: the Italians too are well worthy of my regard, on account of the fertility of their ge­nius and the vivacity of their conceptions: yet none of these nations will I spare.

[Page 45]A remark in a certain Paris review, though it made me smile, requires some explanation to the public. It states, that I have not indiscriminately passed my satirical censure on all nations; that I ought to have looked nearer round me, and might full as easily have traced in Germany, instances of the same ridiculous pride with which I made myself so merry when I find it in the French, the Spani­ard, or the English, if I had but deigned to cast an eye on the circle more immediately within my own observation.

Instances of the most laughable personal pride, it is true, are plentifully to be met with in the German universities, in the German cities, in the German nobility, and in short in every thing that may be called German; but instances of silly na­tional pride occur but very seldom in people, who despise the works of their own artists, who give the preference to foreign manufactures, and to foreign learning, and occasionally console themselves by a comparison with the petty nation of the Swiss. With what assurance could I have exposed the slight traces of national pride to be met with among the honest Germans, when one of the most learned men of our age reproaches them with the want of this useful folly as a very great national defect? This gentleman says, in his preface to the history of the frogs, "In Eu­rope there exists a great nation, distinguished by laboriousness and industry, possessing men of inven­tive [Page 46] faculties and of great genius in as great a num­ber as any other, little addicted to luxury, and the most valiant among the brave. This nation never­theless hates and despises itself, purchases, praises, and imitates only what is foreign; it imagines that no dress can be elegant, no food or wine delicious or even palatable, no dwelling commodious, unless stuff, taylor, clothes, cook, wine, furniture, and architect, come to it at an excessive expence from abroad; and what adds a zest to all, from a coun­try inhabited by its natural enemies. This singular nation exalts and praises solely and above measure the genius and wit of foreigners, the poetry of fo­reigners, the paintings of foreigners; and especi­ally with regard to literature, foreign books written in the most miserable style, are solely purchased, read, and admired by these infatuated people, who know little even of their own history, save from the faulty, unfaithful, and malicious relations of fo­reign authors."

Let others decide on the justice of this well-meant reproach; for me it only remains to inform the Parisian censor, that I am really no German, although I write German, and yield, in his opinion to none in the humility with which I address the Austrian and Swabian nobility, according to the custom of the country, using the title of Gracious Lord, and seem to him to sacrifice truth at the shrine of servile adulation.

Chapter II. Of Individual Pride, and the Pride of different Classes.

FOLLY is the queen of the world, and we all, more or less, wear her livery, her ribbands, her stars, and her bells. Most men, being partial to themselves, esteem only their own image in others. The predominancy of vanity among mankind is what causes the number of the proud to be so great, since it is from vanity that all pride arises, while self-conceit which begets this vanity is by no means originally implanted in human nature, like that necessary self-love, which incites every crea­ture to attend to its own preservation. It seems rather an adventitious quality which must have arisen in a state of society, when the mind became capable of comparing itself with others, and which, in consequence, has been interwoven with our other assumed opinions, and pervades all our ac­tions and motives. We generally have too good an opinion of our personal qualities, not to take pleasure in comparing ourselves with others; and the man of sense equally with the fool entertains the same complacent ideas of himself, founded on this comparison; only in the last it is always [Page 48] more absurd, in proportion to the futility and injustice of his parallel.

Self-conceit begets arrogance, haughtiness, va­nity, frivolity and ostentation, and appears in va­rious shapes, according to the difference it meets with in the natural intellects, in the mode of edu­cation and of living, in the society, in the station, and in the rank and fortune of men. In little minds, whatever form it assumes, it is always folly; in minds more enlightened, it sometimes is linked with knowledge; in all it subsists either openly or in secret at the expence of others, especially where it is the only antidote against the malice with which a number of fools depreciate one wise man.

The self-conceit of every one must of necessity clash with that of his neighbour, and of course in­crease by opposition; for whoever is not as much valued by others, as he thinks he deserves, esteems himself the more, by comparing their supposed ig­norance, with his ideal worth; while by openly con­temning his competitor, this last is likewise induced to fall into the same train of thinking with respect to his own advantages, which he, by the same mode of arguing, conceives to be superior to those of his neighbour, for exactly the same reason. Self-conceit too opens the way to an irresistible satisfaction, by the tacit agreement which mankind [Page 49] seem to have entered into, that each shall love in a certain degree in another what they think worthy of admiration in themselves. Now, as in both cases self-conceit in a lively temper becomes a passion, it leads us into innumerable errors, since passion al­ways affects our sight in such a way, that we see but one side of the picture, in which too we are sure to behold no more than we chuse.

We always return to the consideration of our dear selves, just as the imagination of a lover is ever recurring to the contemplation of his mistress; he neither sees nor regards any thing but the object of his affection. So too the self admirer is blind and deaf to all but his own astonishing perfections; he is provoked at whatever does not exactly coin­cide with his ideas of them, and supposes that his own conviction of their existence is sufficient to render them equally discernible to all: as some years ago, a young English inamorato, possessed with the true spirit of Quixotism, constrained our inoffensive country people whom he met with in the fields round Lausanne, to confess that a certain young lady of Geneva, whom he named to them, was the most lovely of her sex, by threatening them with the point of his sword.

Loving ourselves beyond all others, so we think ourselves entitled to the first place, and believing [Page 50] our way of thinking on all points to be perfect­ly right, we consequently look upon our judgment as more sound, and our penetration as more subtle, than the judgment or penetration of such as de­viate from our received opinions: with regard to such as agree with us, we only esteem them as representing ourselves; and, misled by these selfish notions, we wish to be regarded in the same pleasing light by others as we look on ourselves; but experience, alas! teaches us that our thoughts, our opinions, and our sentiments, please others only in so far as they accord with their own; for this reason our vanity forces us to esteem in others that coincidence of opinion which assures us of their esteem, while we cannot avoid hating the contra­riety of their sentiments to ours; because we most certainly know, that they for the same reason either hate or at least despise us; and again, many people, averse to disturb the repose they enjoy in the downy lap of self-complacency, never take the trouble to investigate the opinions of others, or to weigh their own against them; and so, remaining ignorant of their respective merits, go on in the beaten path of invariably giving the preference to themselves.

These fundamental principles, deduced from na­ture by the most acute philosophers, and confirmed by the daily experience of every attentive observer of mankind, throw a light on many ludicrous ap­pearances [Page 51] which are constantly to be seen around us, or obs [...]rved in history, which appears to be no other than an account of men's infirmities and de­fects, all which arise from self-conceit, either with respect to ourselves or others.

Man looks upon himself as the centre to which all created beings tend. Among the pismires in­habiting this mighty mole-hill▪ there have always been some who could not discard the idea, that the sun only shone for them to bask in; that yon­der starry worlds were nothing more than golden studs placed for the sake of ornament in the fir­mament, and that the whole of this magnificent system was created solely for the supply of their wants, the gratification of their senses, and the amusement of their imaginations. Many orders of men have continually flattered themselves with the idea that they were the chief, if not the only objects of Divine Providence, and have, in consequence, ascribed innumerable effects of the general and re­gular course of things, to an immediate interposi­tion of the Deity, solely regarding themselves, ac­cording as their prejudices, their passions, their in­terest, or their vanity might incite them to believe.

The same folly is observable in individuals of all ranks, for each is in his own eye a being of the greatest importance: true, he may often yield the [Page 52] precedence to others, but that only because they are held in higher estimation by the rest of the world, for he is very far from respecting them in his heart, and the less on account of this mortifying pre-eminence; for this very reason it is, that the individual whom every one places immediately below himself in worth, is evidently the first of his profession. After the battle of Salamis, all the commanders were en­joined to declare before the altar of Neptune, upon oath, who had conducted himself best on that day; every one of them claimed for himself the first palm, but they were unanimous in allotting the second to Themistocles.

All men prize above measure their own taste and favourite science, and esteem every one who has not a genius for that particular branch of knowledge, as unqualified. This is carried so far, that men often ridiculously conceive the delights of another world will be tasteless without the enjoy­ment of their most cherished passion: the sports­man believes that when he is freed from the narrow bounds of this nether world, his spirit will be eter­nally happy in following the pleasures of the chace, from one planet to another, through the whole ex­panse of heaven; and the alchymist entertains no doubt but that the elect will be blessed to all eter­nity, in the perusal and contemplation of Paracelsus. To adduce but one instance, Le Sack, a famous [Page 53] French dancing master during the reign of queen Anne, in great admiration once asked a friend, whether it was true that Mr. Harley was made an Earl and Lord Treasurer; and finding it confirmed, said, "Well, I wonder what the devil the queen could see in him; for I taught him to dance two years, and he was the greatest looby that ever I had to do with."

Self-conceit always exalts a man above his pro­per level, and perverts his right perception of the fitness of things. Every prince must have his court days and his ambassadors be his dominions three miles or three hundred in extent; every nobleman his attendants and pages, whether his revenue justifies such ostentation or not; and every shop­keeper's wife, whether she sells tape by the yard or pins by the hundred for six days, must on the seventh, be a fine lady. A blockhead will ever extol the depth of his penetration; the knave his honesty; the blind follower of a particular religious tenet his thorough conviction of its infallibility; the hypocrite his piety; the upstart his nobility; the de­mirep her virtue; the old maid her chastity; which she indeed often to her sorrow retains for want of it's having ever been tempted; the idle and in­significant can pertly engross the whole of a con­versation of which they make themselves the topic, without feeling how much they depress men of [Page 54] sense on such occasions. There is not a youth­ful coxcomb in the universe who would barter his head for that of the most eminent genius; nor a wealthy scoundrel that cares for any kind of merit but the cunning that has brought him his riches; and no virtue can counterbalance the glit­tering gewgaws of coronets and embroidery in the eyes of a titled ignoramus. Those who indulge in self conceit generally go farther, and not only love their opinions like themselves, but look with scorn on all who entertain different ideas, and who do not exactly give the preference to what they esteem worthy of it. The idler pities the busy fool that is ever immersed in the occupations of trade; the hunter despises the fellow that cannot talk of dogs and horses; the gamester thinks those who care not for cards little better than clods; the burgo­master who magisterially gives importance to trifles, and the counsellor who scribbles his decison on the cases that are brought for his consideration with the same ease as he gulps down his wine, ask with haughty self-sufficiency, what good the pedant does who can employ his time no better than to write a book? To him who has no sensibility of soul, all the nobler, the purer emotions of the heart, seem absurd and ridiculous; the man who does not feel the poignancy of genuine wit stares at the applause it excites; while on the other hand low jokes, puns, and obscene allusions form a fund of [Page 55] entertainment to congenial vulgar minds; to gid­dy girls, whose hearts pant for a fop, and whose lot is often a fool, the manly accomplishments of knowledge, sense and seriousness of character, are of no worth; men of a churlish temper look on the enchanting features, the softly alluring eyes and graceful mien of the lovely daughters of our general mother, merely as childish playthings, un­worthy the attention of the lords of the creation; mercenary mercantile souls, who value a woman only by the weight of gold she brings with her as a portion, are incapable of conceiving how any one can be such a dolt as to take a wife with good sense, delicate feelings, and a benevolent heart, in prefer­ence to stupidity with money; and the captivating allurements which nature teaches a blooming girl to throw out for the grand purpose of her creation, are inveighed against and reprimanded, as downright immodesty by the antiquated prude, who has lost all powers of attraction.

One of the objects in which self-conceit most predominantly appears, is in matters of religion, and the opinion we entertain of our punctual discharge of the religious duties incumbent on us: it is sure, in this respect, to declare itself in an inexpressible contempt and pity of those who do not make such a public display of their piety as we do. Hardly a day passes without the sacrifice of some innocent [Page 56] victim at the altar of the malignant passions of people of this cast, to whom evil speaking is food, cavilling their entertainment, slander their delight, false as­persion the enlivening fire of their discourse, and malice the soul of their actions. Such gloomy zeal­ots too often become the slaves of every vice, and are by turns, lascivious, gluttonous, quarrelsome, ambitious, avaricious, hard-hearted, and cruel; the tumults of their sordid minds, at the loss of a trifle, might be compared to the uproar of chaos; and under the cloak of devotion they sin against common honesty: but although none are so punc­tual in attending divine service, though none make such solemn preparations at the approach of every religious festival, though the word Christianity is ever in their mouths, though they are indefatigable in visiting the infirm and administering spiritual consolation to those whose situation would rather require the opened hand of charity, though none pay greater respect to their own clergy, though none so vehemently exclaim against the growth of infidelity; yet the world is not so effectually deceived by their hypocritical professions, as their consciences are lulled by their own sophistications; for every honest man abhors such lip-service, and every wise man smiles at their sanctified hypocrisy.

Partiality of judgement, with all its concomitants, injurious contempt and censure, extends itself [Page 57] through all characters, stations, and professions; people of contrary dispositions, of different ages and tastes, reciprocally think each other stupid, ridi­culous, and full of imperfections: the advantages which they respectively enjoy are the subject of their exultation, and those they are defective in, they cry down and disdain. Thus fools are ever making faces at each other, and jostling their empty noddles; and thus arise the many squab­bles about trifles that daily occur in the world, and in which neither party are in the right or in the wrong.

Shallow-brained coxcombs entertain the most marked contempt for men of genius; the former are continually buzzing in the ears of the latter the barren objects of their trifling observations, and the uninteresting occurrences of their frivolous lives; while these cannot but behold with indif­ference the flimsy materials which form the furni­ture of their senseless pates, and, sighing at the in­significancy of their conversation, turn with disgust from the daily round of the same remarks which neither instruct nor entertain. A vulgar mind, and such as is only adequate to the common occupations of life, thinks these alone useful, noble, and praise-worthy, and the time that is otherwise employed totally lost; he pities the conceited blockheads who embark in literary pursuits and scientific researches, [Page 58] and who cannot be contented with the obvious knowledge and such ideas as immediately present themselves, without the trouble of further pursuit than looking out at the window, or walking to and fro before the door. Wise men and fools are there­fore reciprocally tiresome and insipid to each other whenever they meet, and both repay themselves for the tormenting uneasiness they have felt, by mutual contempt.

Professions likewise are animated with the same spirit of disdain towards each other, according to the ideas they have respectively formed of their utility and rank in society: the citizen despises the farmer; the seaman the soldier; the soldier the civilian; the civilian the ecclesiastic; and among ecclesiastics numberless are the pretences adduced to countenance their mutual contempt; while the courtier expresses his derision of them all.

Among the learned, mutual scorn is as common and apparent as among the most illiterate. There are few of the former who do not prize their fa­vourite study above all human knowledge, and are indifferent to every thing that does not regard their own hobby-horse: the naturalist thinks very meanly of the etymological opinions and laborious investigations of the grammarian; the botanist is equally uncharitable with respect to the studies of [Page 59] the astronomer; the lawyer cannot bear to hear of the utility or learning of a physician; and the man who, by any new contrivance, an electrical machine, an air balloon, or a diving bell, has acquired riches and a name, cannot comprehend how the world can trifle away time in empty prattle about politics. A country alehouse-keeper has more esteem for one substantial farmer, than for all the wits in Christendom; the natural philosopher laughs aloud at the imbecility of the ethic philosopher, who foolishly supposes that the contemplation of the nature of men and of their actions, is of more consequence than the contemplation of the nature and actions of frogs; the mathematician's standard of excellence is his rule and compasses, his arithmetical tables, and decimal fractions, and these stupid inventions again are the derision of the metaphysician. The question was once put in a mixed company at Paris, "what a metaphysician was?" a mathematician present an­swered, "An ignorant blockhead." Let the chy­mists, the naturalists, the physicians, the moralists, and the experimental philosopher be asked, "what a mathematician is?" they will answer, "An igno­rant blockhead." Prose writers have a great anti­pathy to each other; some pride themselves upon the gigantic size of their works, others on the selection and terseness of their subjects; the former rake toge­ther in their writings cart-loads of rubbish from the assemblage of all that has been invented or heard of [Page 60] since the deluge; they are never tired of deep re­searches, and spin out their matter with the most patient industry, ringing the changes of their absurd notions till the reader nods over them, not from a principle of thought and acquiescence, but lulled by the incessant repetition of the same sounds. Such authors reverence their brethren who can write a folio, while be who can only fill a duodecimo, must be a very poor genius indeed; for to confine one-self to say more on a subject than is requi­site for its discussion, proves, in their opinion, a de­plorable sterility of intellect; they call writings of judgement, penetration, and elegance, unintelligi­ble, trifling, frothy, sophistical, French nonsence: they dislike wit as eunuchs dislike love, and, being genuine pedants, call all such as are endowed with common sense with its purity and simplicity, the un­enlightened herd; while these, on the other hand, think a fool's cap would be the most proper orna­ment to set off the gravity and overbearing conceit, so visibly imprinted in their long and solemn visages. Poets think very meanly of prose writers, for prose is the common vehicle of conversation; and when their works consecrated to immortality, expire be­fore the next returning solstice after their birth, the perverted taste of the whole age is vehemently called in question; but they likewise despise each other, and of all their creditors, those to whom they owe a spite are the surest of punctual payment. As [Page 61] their choler is confessedly more irritable than that of any other people, so they do not rest satisfied with expressing their contempt of what they think despicable, but, as those who consort with wolves must join in their howlings, so they would oblige whoever has his character at heart, to side with them, or submit to the application of that article in the laws of Solon, which declares all such as re­main neuter in any dangerous commotion in the state, infamous, as not caring for the happiness or misery of their country, nay, even making a merit of their forbearance; on which account a poet often alternately employs, according to his humour, his pen in panegyrics and pasquinades on the same man, who is, perhaps, to-day a man of genius or Mecaenas, and to-morrow a dunce or an Omar, who ordered the destruction of the Alexandri­an library, giving this memorable reason, that whatever learning it contained that was not com­prehended in the Alcoran, was prejudicial to the interests of the true religion, and whatever was already written in that sacred book need not be elsewhere preserved.

From all this it appears, that men slight each other from being the slaves of self-conceit, which is avow­edly the case with almost every one; insignificant in­deed is the number of those equitable minds, which [Page 62] can, with philosophical indifference, weigh their own advantages against those of others, and observe the lightness of their own balance.

The agreement or disagreement of ideas and sentiments, is the sure criterion by which to judge of the mutual esteem or contempt between the parties; whoever is much sought after by little minds, and can associate with and please the weak and ignorant, may well be suspected of similar dis­qualifications, which is a consolatory reflection for the hatred which is generally entertained by the ignorant against the learned. Of a person we do not at all know, we form not an advantageous idea if we find he is the admiration of fools, for the centre of gravity itself is not so attractive as dulness to its counterpart. Where the prince is a fool, that country is the paradise of fools; like the ephemeral insects of a summer's day, the votaries of folly emerge from their retreats, and betake themselves to Court, the moment a soul congenial to their own ascends the throne; there they are in their ele­ment; the most unmeritorious sycophants are ad­vanced to the highest dignities; all that is fool­ish, vicious and absurd, becomes fashionable, and is most decidedly preferred, while merit and parts retire dejected from the society of men, who hate what is not made after their own image.

[Page 63]There is another cause of partiality or contempt for men and manners, which unites with self-con­ceit to beget vanity and pride, that is, the circum­stances of local situation; the objects that surround us, the society, the country in which we live, and the government we are under, all influence more or less our thoughts, motives, and actions; we form our ideas according as we are situated in the above respects, and adopt to them our opinions of the decency, truth, propriety, and beauty of every thing that comes within our observation.

He who has never travelled, who has read no­thing, and who shuns the conversation of those who have, limits his ideas to what he daily sees around him, imagines that beyond the little span he inha­bits there is nothing but wild uncultivated desarts and gloomy wildernesses; or forming his opinions of all that is beyond the circle of his own observa­tion, by what is within it, he is like the Parisian mechanic spoken of in the account of an excursion from Paris to St. Cloud, who believed, that the hills bordering his view were uninhabited, and, from the horse-chesnut trees in the public walks at Paris, concluded, that all grain and pulse grew likewise on trees.

From this dependency on the objects which sur­round us proceeds a rooted habit of judging of distant [Page 64] things by the scale of domestic appearances, and by the notions which prevail in our own little circle. In Paris, for this reason, notwithstanding all that may be thought of it in other countries, it is by no means an object of ridicule for five or six city sportsmen to go a hunting in a coach with jack-boots, bag-wigs, guns, swords and pistols, who when they come to a proper place, take their stands behind so many trees, in order to let fly at any poor hare that may happen to run that way: for this reason the negroes paint their devils white and their god black; for this reason certain nations painted the goddess of love with monstrous breasts hanging down almost to her knees: and for this same reason it was, that on endeavouring to make an honest Swiss comprehend the extent of kingly wealth and magnificence, he asked with a proud consciousness of the importance of his rustic riches, "whether a king had a hundred head of cattle on the hill?" Whoever is of consequence in his hamlet must be a respectable person every where. At the congress of Baden in 1714, all the several plenipo­tentiaries dined one day in public, and many people assembled round the table out of curiosity. Marshal Villars discovered among then a very pretty young woman from Zurich, and went up to her to give her a kiss, when instantaneously a thick-headed crook-legged dapperling of a Zuricker, pressed for­ward through the croud and cried out like a [Page 65] demoniac, "Hold, hold, Marshal, let her alone, for she is my sister, and her husband is warden of our company."

The smaller and more insulated the place or society is in which we live, the lower and more con­tracted are the opinions we form in consequence; and when we are ignorant of every thing beyond our narrow sphere of life, whereby to form a just estimate of things, we look upon our tenets as the only proper rule of judgment, being unacquainted with the existence, much less with the probable merits of any other. The more abridged a man is in his knowledge, the higher does he value himself, and the more insolent does he behave towards others. He condemns every thought that does not flow from his own fruitful brain, and every action and fashion, of which he has not set the example. He persecutes as much as he can with impunity every man of genius, whom he supposes, on ac­count of the superiority of his talents, necessarily inimical to his manner of thinking and projects; he styles an uniform coincidence with his ideas, good sense; blindness towards his failings, friend­ship; and in any case not to further his views, is treachery and a crime; he fancies his reputation is firmly established, when he is stared at and admired by a number of clowns; and like the commander of a ship, who rules over his little [Page 66] wooden realm with despotic sway, he is almost convinced, that the axis of the globe must quake before him, like the table which he strikes in the vehemence of his rhetoric.

This defect is incurable in every man of note who inhabits a small town, when his mind is not more ex­panded than the place of his residence; for he who is the man of most consideration in a little circle, will naturally detest extensive society, where he is sure to lose his pre-eminence, he will particularly be hostile to men of commanding understandings, and will avoid their conversation, for his soul will shrink from their scrutiny. Men are infinitely more pleased with the company of such as out of com­plaisance or ignorance accede to their absurd pro­positions, than of those who insinuate that they are erroneous.

The half animated oyster, confined within its shell, knows as much of the world, as a man in­volved in this intellectual mist does of the real situ­ation or value of things. Always surrounded by the same objects, he will never alter his creed; he will ever esteem his own belief as an incontrovert­ible argument in every dispute; he is in himself all in all, and those who hold other principles, are blinded by falsehood. Such men ever adhere to the axiom, that relative consequence is real conse­quence; [Page 67] in vain you may put a standard into their hands to measure themselves by, they indignantly cast it away, they have forsooth already measured themselves, and must, to be sure, be great and con­sequential men throughout the world, for they are of weight and importance on their own dunghill. This excessive self-esteem makes them look at all other persons and things through the wrong end of the perspective glass; and the value of all who are not of their stamp is imperceptible to their perverted vision. On this account the most unimportant trifles in their hands swell to matters of great mo­ment; and thence also proceeds their opinion, that no one ever was, or ever will be capable of rivalling them in the greatness or usefulness of their exploits. It is the prevalence of this infatuation that solely oc­casions the big swoln gravity, which is the soul of ad­ministration in the petty jurisdiction of all countries. Every thing must bow down and vanish before the tremendous authority of a judge of this description; when he smoothes his countenance into all-suffici­ciency and with an elevation of shoulders, throws his straddling legs full length before him, clears his lungs with a loud and awful hem, then graciously declines his face from the contemplation of the ceiling, and slowly bending his eyes down­ward, casts them with ineffible disdain on the circle of bob-wigs and uncombed locks around him, all which seem unanimously to exclaim, "the world [Page 68] sure must confess this man is great, for he is the greatest in our town-hall!"

These true and unexaggerated observations, prove that the generality of mankind are proud; that self-conceit is the fountain-head of pride; and that pride generates the most ridiculous arrogance; when stupidity and confined knowledge of things become by outward circumstances the companions of self-conceit.

Chapter III. Of the Pride of whole Nations.

WHOLE nations think just as the generality of individuals do of their own advantages. We might safely conclude from the thoughts and opi­nions of single persons, what their combined effects are in the community they belong to, did we not also directly know, that every nation must have the same manner of fashioning its ideas with the individuals who compose it. All histories are memorials of the partiality of nations for themselves; the most civilized and the most savage people shew, that they believe they possess certain advantages, which they disallow to others; either the religious tenets they hold, their customs, their government, or some other peculiarity, is a pleasing subject of contemplation to them. As individuals, so villages, cities, pro­vinces, nations, are infected with this darling self-conceit, and their own particular vain glory; and every member of the community, by a very natural chain of ideas, takes part in the general vanity, and joins with his village or his nation in railing at other villages and nations of the world. About fifty years ago, the inhabitants of a certain small [Page 70] village in Rheinthal, a small district, and one of those called the dependencies of Switzerland, being possessed by all the Swiss Cantons, urged a com­plaint to the judge, that the parson had on the preceding Sunday, audaciously uttered these repre­hensible words, "that hardly one hundred souls out of the whole of their illustrious community would be saved."

Every nation is exceedingly pleased with itself, and considers all other societies of men, more or less, as beings of an inferior nature. A foreigner and a barbarian were synonomous terms among the Greeks; and were employed as such among the Romans; and are still so with the majority of the French nation. It happened at the court of Zell, in the time of the late duke, that the duchess (who was of the French family of d'Olbreuse) with some French noblemen were the only company at his highness's table; one of the Frenchmen suddenly exclaimed, "It is very droll indeed!" "What is so droll?" said the duke. "That your highness is the only foreigner at table," was the answer. Even the Greenlanders pronounce the word Stranger with an air of contempt, and in some of the towns of the Swiss Cantons, the word Ausburger or alien has the same degrading signification, as is exempli­fied by the answer given a few years ago, by an honest fruiterer in one of those towns, to the in­timation [Page 71] that he received, that his daughter, a very pretty maiden, had captivated the heart of a certain German prince, "No no," says he, "no, no, I know better than to let my daughter have to do with an Ausburger."

National contempt oftener arises from what strikes the senses than the understanding. At Vienna, at Paris, and at Rome, a Swiss and a brute were long esteemed equivalent denominations, and to speak honestly, I have myself felt abashed, when at Versailles I have compared the still and formal gait of the Swiss halberdiers, with the airy flippancy of the monkeys, who danced attendance at the levee. Most people ridicule foreign manners, be­cause they differ from their own; and in this point, few are less blind and arrogant than the French courtiers, who, instead of seeing in Peter the Great, a monarch of genius, who travelled for the sake of improvement, and who had descended from his throne to attain the qualifications necessary to enable him to fill it again worthily, beheld in him no more than a foreigner, a brute, who being ig­norant of French customs, and a stranger to their affectation and grimace, ought as soon as he came among them, to have studied their manners, and have taken a pattern of their undistinguished urba­nity wherewith to civilize his Russian bears.

[Page 72]The mutual contempt between nations too often appears even in members of society who ought to be far above such illiberal prejudices. There are few authors who hear with temper a comparison between writers of their own nation and foreign literati; and let them be ever so unfair and virulent towards each other, they are at all times ready to unite in attacking a foreigner, who should dare to find fault with any one among them.

The arrogant Greeks owed all their advantages, nay, their civilization, to foreigners: the Phenici­ans taught them the use of letters, instructed them in the arts and sciences, gave them laws; the Egyp­tians lent them the mythology on which they built their religion; yet Greece, favoured Greece, was in their eyes, the mother of all nations. It is re­marked, that the Greek historians seldom make use of foreign names, sometimes totally omitting them, but more commonly altering them with the most scrupulous attention to give them a Grecian turn and a more harmonious sound; and it is therefore not surprising, that in succeeding times, this vain-glorious people adopted the persuasion, that nearly all the other nations of the earth were colonies from Greece.

The modern Italians confidently place themselves upon a level with the ancient Romans, without re­flecting [Page 73] that the descendants of these conquerors of the world are the most insignificant among the slaves of caprice and superstition; or that the cities, whose pristine fame they glory in, and even many of those whose names have been renowned in the middle and latter ages, are now nearly uninhabited, and their unfrequented streets overgrown with weeds. Many small towns in the Campania of Rome were the na­tive places of Roman consuls, generals and em­perors, and the present squalid inhabitants of such places speak of them as their townsmen and relations. The peasant, who can point out the spot where such or such an eminent character was born, firmly believes, in common with all the inhabitants round the sacred barn and hog-stye, or whatever else the Roman villa has been metamorphosed into, that their countryman, their progenitor, was the great­est man history ever made mention of. A single senator of Rome, deciding without appeal on the petty squabbles and disputes of the lowest order of citizens, is the actual representative of that tribunal to which the impressive majesty of the ancient se­nate and of the Roman people is dwindled. He has four assessors called conservators, who are changed every quarter. These conservators, as well as the senator himself, are nominated by the pope, who does not even leave the Romans that remnant of liberty which many cities enjoy, even under abso­lute monarchies, the free election of their own ma­gistrates; [Page 74] yet, nevertheless, both the senator and these conservators idly conceive themselves the suc­cessors of that august body whose seats they at pre­sent occupy, and that they are entitled to all the respect due to a Roman senate, and to all its invalu­able privileges, while the vicegerent of heaven him­self must be highly honoured by seeing at his feet that assembly before whom so many kings and princes had bowed their necks. The Trastaverini, that is the wretched militia of the ward of Trasta­vera in modern Rome, the ancient Regio Transtibu­rina, absolutely call themselves descendants of the Trojans of remote antiquity, and look upon the inhabitants of the other quarters of Rome as a mob of spurious Latians; and yet they value both, in the midst of their poverty and bigotry, as being citizens of ancient Rome, from whose former cou­rage and inflexibility they are so far degenerated, that the very rare occurrence among them of the execution of a malefactor almost frightens them into fits. All the modern inhabitants of Rome of the lower class, console themselves with the re­membrance of the noble actions of their imagina­ry progenitors, and this makes even misery in Rome assume the air of pride and disdain. In a tu­mult that had arisen there, in consequence of the high price of corn, it once happened that the son of a poor baker's widow of the Trastavera ward was killed; the pope, who feared the worst conse­quences [Page 75] from the popular effervescence encreased by this accident, immediately deputed a cardinal and several of the nobility to see the widow, and of­fer whatever she required as an atonement for the in­jury she had sustained; to which the Roman ma­tron indignantly replied, "I do not sell my blood." Towards the approach of a public festival, a whole family sometimes pinch themselves in every neces­sary, in order to have wherewithal to ride about in a coach. Such families as cannot, even with the utmost oeconomy, attain the pleasure of hiring one, adopt another expedient to exhibit themselves: the mother dresses herself in the habit of a chamber­maid, and in that character accompanies her daugh­ter, tricked out in her holiday clothes, while the fa­ther follows in procession with the proper accoutre­ments of a lackey.

Englishmen themselves acknowledge, that they inherit from their ancestors a stupid prepossession against all other inhabitants of the globe. When­ever one of them is engaged in any quarrel with a for [...]gner, he is sure to begin his address with some reproachful nick-name, which he appropri­ates to the native country of the person he is con­tending with. Foreigners are on such an occassion respectively saluted with the appellation of French puppy, Italian monkey, Dutch ox, or German hog. As to the word French, the national antipathy [Page 76] against their opposite neighbours is so great, that to call a foreigner, dog, is not insulting enough, but he must be called French dog, to convey the highest degree of detestation. The national preju­dices of the English are also too conspicuous in their conduct towards the natives of their two sister king­doms, that compose the British empire, who live un­der the same king and the same government, and fight with them for one common cause. Nothing is more frequently heard in England, than, "thou beggarly Scott;" "thou blood-thirsty, impudent Irish lout:" and in general, an Englishman well stuffed with beef, pudding, and porter, heartily de­spises every other nation of Europe. The Yorkshire fox-hunter esteems himself co-equal with all the princes of the earth; for his fox-hounds are the best in the whole county. An Englishman to be sure, too, must solely, by being born a Briton, have an innate taste for works of genius, and be a thorough connoisseur in the fine arts; and although the pope has expressly prohibited the sale of any of the paint­ings or sculptures of famous artists to strangers, yet these proud islanders on their visits to Italy expend yearly as much at Rome in statues and paintings as they used to do before; that is to say, they pur­chase as much daubed canvass and broken marble as the money they have set apart for the acquisition of curiosities will command.

[Page 77]Let me likewise give the reader the statement of the parallel drawn by Englishmen of approved learn­ing and talents, between them and other nations, in their own stile. They say, "The French are po­lite, witty, and easily elated, but they are a parcel of hungry slaves, and cannot call either their time, their purses, or their persons their own, for all is the property of their king. The Italians are with­out liberty, morals, or religion. The Spaniards are brave, devout, and jealous of their honour, but poor and oppressed; and for all their bragging, that the sun never rises or sets in the Spanish dominions, they never dare make their freedom, learning, arts, manufactures, commerce, or atchievements, the sub­jects of their boasts. The Portuguese, too, are all ignorant and superstitious slaves. The Germans are always either in actual war, or recovering from its devastations. The Dutch lag behind in every vir­tue, are deeply sunk in avarice, and are only roused from their natural supineness, to take an active part in trade, by the lust of gain. Switzerland is scarcely perceptible in the map of the world; and to draw our attention, the virtues of the Swiss ought to shine forth with the lustre of a diamond; but the diamond, if there be any, is by to means of the first water, and indeed tolerably opaque." Thus it is, that all nations, when put in the ballance by the steady hand of a prejudiced Englishman, are found too light; and hence proceeds the remarkable cold­ness [Page 78] and indifference they all evince toward a fo­reigner on their first acquaintance.

The French in their own estimation are the only thinking beings in the universe. They vouchsafe sometimes to converse with strangers; but it is, as creatures of a superior nature may be conceived to converse with men, who of course derive the great­est emolument and importance from such conde­scension. Such among them are peculiarly disgust­ing, who with pretended compassion, and an hate­ful display of nice equity, deign to allow a few grains of genius or virtue to other nations; although it very plainly appears, that this favourable opi­nion is not given to their merits; but is a sponta­neous effusion of the exuberant politeness in these most courteous people. These men surely will not have the effrontery to deny, that they look upon all nations who do not equal the French in power, or who are somewhat beneath them in smartness, or in a taste for the frivolous arts, that are the study and the glory of Frenchmen, as barbarians, and despise them accordingly. Their jestures, conversations, and writings, daily betray their firm persuasion, that there is nothing great, noble, or amiable out of their empire, and that nothing perfect can be produced any where else, but under the fostering patronage of their grand Monarque.

[Page 79]The French think themselves entitled to give laws to every nation, because all Europe implicitly follow the dictates of their milliners, taylors, hair­dressers and cooks. Where is the Frenchman who will deny, that his countrymen think themselves the first and greatest people of the globe? How ill can Mr. Lefranc, in one of the discourses he addresses to the king, brook the audacity of the English, who dare to put themselves on a level with the French; for Patin himself has said, "That the Britons were among men, what wolves are among the quadru­peds?" How many numberless times have not the French stiled their sovereign, the first monarch of the world? Esteeming themselves the first-born sons of nature, they will sometimes deign to look on their neighbours as their younger brethren, and will allow them to be laborious, tolerably good collectors, or epitomizers; nay, occasionally, men of penetration. But why is Newton despised in France for his useful discoveries, because he did not espy all things? Why is Raphael himself called so poor and spiritless, and his divine picture of the transfiguration weak and lifeless? Innumerable in­stances of that national pride, which allows no great men out of France, are too well known not to be the ridicule of other nations. The French repeatedly prefer their superficial trifler Boileau, to the harmoni­ous versification, the solid and ethic reasoning, and the glowing unfading tints with which Pope has de­lineated [Page 80] the nature, foibles, and frailties of mankind. And let us only recollect, that it is a truth in the his­tory of the progress of genius that at the same time that Italy possessed the most inimitable poets and actors, and that Shakespeare the bright morning star of the drama, broke forth in England, France could boast of none but the most wretched rhy­mers.

Upon the whole vanity and self-conceit are equal­ly predominant in all nations. The Greenlander, who laps with his dog in the same platter, despises the invaders of his country, the Danes. The Cos­sacks and Calmucks possess the greatest contempt for their masters, the Russians. The Negroes too, though the most stupid among the inhabitants of the earth are xcessively vain. Ask the Carribee In­dians, who live at the mouth of the Oronoque, from what nation they derive their origin; they answer, "why, we only are men." In short, there is hardly any nation under the sun, in which instances of pride, vanity, and arrogance, do not occur. They all, more or less, resemble the Canadian, who thinks he compliments an European, when he says, "He is a man as well as I:" or the Spanish preacher, who, discoursing upon the temptation of Jesus by the de­vil, enthusiastically exclaimed, "But happily for mankind, and fortunately for the Son of God, the lofty tops of the Pyrennees hid the delightful country [Page 81] of Spain from the eyes of the Redeemer, or the temptation had assuredly been too strong for our blessed Lord!"

Each nation, too, fashions its ideas of beauty or deformity by the resemblance or difference it per­ceives between itself and others. The Indian fabu­lists recount, that there is in those regions a country, all the inhabitants of which are hump-backed. A well-shaped youth happened to visit this tract, whom the honest crook-backs no sooner saw, than they gathered round him to see the monstrous deformity of the stranger's figure, their astonishment at which was visible in every countenance, extending its effects even to the extremities of their hunches, and the ri­dicule it occasioned burst forth in loud fits of laugh­ter and derision. As the youth's good luck would have it, there was a wise man among this gibbous fraternity, who perhaps had before seen such a lusus naturae as straight-shouldered men; he addressed the multitude as follows: "My good friends, what are you about? let us not insult the unfortunate. Hea­ven created us well made and beautiful, and adorn­ed our backs with graceful protuberances; let us then rather repair to the temple, and give thanks to the Eternal for these inestimable blessings."

Whoever, therefore, would not in his own coun­try be esteemed a foreigner, or who would not incur [Page 82] the general contempt of the intellectually deformed society in which he lives, must hold the same opinions as are held around him, must fall in with all the reigning prejudices, and must, as much as possi­ble, bow his back to the fashion of the national humour; for if he should have the humility to think meanly, however deservingly so, of his coun­try or its manners, he will be reckoned an unnatu­ral calumniator.

Chapter IV. Of Pride arising in Nations from Imaginary Advantages.

THE various appearances of national pride all converge to two distinct genera, each of them sub­divisible into several species. The advantages on which national pride is founded, are either imagi­nary or real, which distinction forms the grand dif­ference between the two original kinds of pride; both of them are discoverable in the most consider­able nations, for every one has its prejudices, which are the foundation of its particular vanity: its pride, however, is often grounded on a true and just conception of its own advantages; and in this case it is materially different from that resulting from prejudices; and, on the other hand, the pride arising from imaginary advantages is ever, more than the other sort, sure to appear▪ in an over bearing sense of pre-eminence and contempt for others.

Self-conceit often makes men think they per­ceive advantages where none exist, or attribute qua­lifications to themselves, in which they are evidently [Page 84] deficient. Our vanity is never more pleased than when our imperfections are glossed over, except when they are even exalted into the very contrary advantages by the delusive power of adulation. Proceeding on this principle, a poet once ventured to compare the stature of a lady of high rank, who had no other personal defect than being very di­minutive, to the towering cedar: the little creature, on hearing the author recite his verses, could not controul the lively sensations his flattery excited, but sat smiling on her chair. "Go no further," said a bystander to the poet, whose simile of the cedar recurred every moment, "Go no further, for fear the good lady in the heat of her happiness should start up, and at once discover her natural de­fect and thy abominable deception."

Self-conceit builds on imaginary advantages or perfections the most ridiculous pride; like that with which a Spaniard or a Portuguese struts when he compares his nut-brown complexion with the swarthy hide of a Moor; or which puffs into consequence a burgher of Bern when he can fill his belly to the utmost. The inhabitants of the Ladrones believe, that their language is the only one in the world, and therefore that all the other nations of the earth are dumb. An Indian tribe on the banks of the Ohio in North America have hair of an extra­ordinary length; they therefore suppose all people [Page 85] with short hair are slaves. The Turks, who are reproached for the inconsistency with which they distribute offices and places to such as cannot be supposed to have the proper qualification for filling them; when, for instance, they are accused with having put a toll-gatherer at the head of an army; reply with the greatest indignation, "That a Turk is fit for every thing:" nay, sultan Osman once made one of his gardeners viceroy of Cyprus, because he had seen him plant out cabbages in a particular clever manner. When the Russian general, Apraxin, was upbraided with having suffered himself to be surpri­sed by Marshal Lehwald, he coolly rejoined, "The Russians never employ either scouts or spies." An inhabitant of the province of Maine in France, proud of the temperate genial warmth with which his native country is blessed, has lately produced a physical history of climates, according to the taste of the old schools, in which he praises the inha­bitants of the warmer, and depreciates those of the colder countries; of course, giving the preference in every thing good and great to the happy tem­perature resulting from the middle situation in which he places his native land. To this blessed region belong Upper Germany, part of Spain, the civilized countries of Wallachia and Moldavia, and the humane and peaceful inhabitants of the fron­tiers of the Austrian and Turkish empires; together [Page 86] with the Cossacks, Calmucks, Afghans, and other people equally celebrated for knowledge and senti­ment.

Self-conceit towers to such an amazing height, and has withal so narrow a basis, that it is very ea­sily overthrown, and its evident futility is often too great to require a refutation. Heartily welcome, therefore, for my part, are the Myrmidons who assisted at the siege of Troy, to the satisfaction of knowing that they were descended from indus­trious ants; and the kings of Madara, to the ho­nour of deriving their pedigree, in a right line, from a jack ass, on which account they always treat every long-eared brayer as a brother, and never fail when it rains to hold an umbrella over him, which they would not on any account do to his driver, as that would be a derogation of their dignity, for he is not a branch of their highly illustrious house. I can­not but smile at the national vanity of many among the French, who even yet trumpet forth the conquest of Mahon, when the whole world knows that this reduction of a small garrison, left entirely to its own exertions, and destitute of succour, was followed by a war pregnant with disasters to France, which severely smarted in every quarter of the globe^*. [Page 87] I read with the same sensations, the before men­tioned French author of the physical history of climates revile the northern nations. "They, to be sure, have invented the most senseless forms of government that ever existed, namely, the Eng­lish, and its attendant, liberty; from them pro­ceeds the practice of duelling; while, forsooth, murder and assassination are more manly, for they are more practised in the favoured warmer regions: in short, those who live beyond a certain degree of latitude deserve the lowest rank among men." This is certainly highly ridiculous. Nor does the vanity of the Italians more move my spleen, who call the Germans downright blockheads because they do not know how to prepare any other poisons than can be counteracted by the physical art, or which appear in manifold symptoms; such as the inflam­mation of the throat, the stomach, the intestines, or the discoloration, and incrustation of the skin; while, on the contrary, the cunning Italian can kill with poisons infinitely more powerful, subtle, and irremediable. It is impossible to recount all the imaginary advantages from which national pride, in its widely extended field of existence, is or has been derived: I shall only touch upon such as are most prominent, and by particularizing them, re­flect as much glory on the nation to which these appertain, as a French general does, when he drags [Page 88] along with him into the field two thousand^* cooks, and esteems it due to his consequence and fame to have a hundred dishes served up at his table.

Chapter V. Of the Pride arising from the imaginary Antiquity or Nobility of a Nation.

THE vanity of mankind has ever filled the immense vacuity beyond the authentic memorials of the origin of every nation, with fabulous history; at pleasure removing their antiquity to the remotest ages, in order proportionally to increase its lustre. Whatever an itinerant bard sung, or an orator rav­ed, became frequently an universal tradition, and in process of time almost an article of religion. The probability of these flattering inventions could no more be called in question, when revered ages had sanctioned the opinion. A prodigy of antient times becomes too easily, in the eyes of purblind posteri­ty, an undeniable truth, while the remoteness of the age precludes a proper search by which to distin­guish falsehood from probability, and this again from certainty; and we are ever more averse to at­tempt these disquisitions, if pride find its account in the well-invented fiction.

The superlatively intelligent, and superlatively grandiloquous Athenians conceived they had sprung [Page 90] up, like mushrooms, from the Attic soil, and there­fore cherished the most sovereign contempt for colonies. The Arcadians rejected with contemp­tuous disdain the science of astrology, because they believed themselves antecedent to the moon. The Egyptians were persuaded they were the most an­cient inhabitants of the earth; according to their chronology, their empire existed forty eight thou­sand eight hundred and sixty-three years before the age of Alexander; it was first peopled by gods who were hatched from eggs, then by demi-gods, and lastly by men.

The Japanese in the same manner suppose them­selves to be lineally descended from gods. They are much offended when their origin is deduced from the Chinese or any other oriental nation; but they have, nevertheless, the modesty to fix the com­mencement of these gods, and do not entirely veil them in the darkness of eternity.

Kuni-Toko-Dat-Sii-No-Mikotto, the first deity who arose from chaos, fixed his residence in Japan, which he created prior to all other countries: this divinity, with his six successors, form the dynasty of heavenly spirits who took Japan under their par­ticular protection, the duration of which is stated to be an innumerable series of ages. The three first of these gods had no wives, but impregnated them­selves, [Page 91] and brought forth what they had begotten. The four last provided themselves with women, yet propagated one another in a supernatural way; till Isanagi-No-Mikotto learnt of the bird Isiatadakki, our by no means contemptible method of gene­ration; but the line of heavenly intelligences in Japan was hereby broken and put an end to, for the race of the Isanagi lost its divine nature by this carnal innovation.

Isanagi was translated, like his predecessors, from earth to heaven; and his son Tensio-Dai-Dsin, who is the same with the sun, commenced the dynasty of the five demi-gods, or gods incarnate, who, ac­cording to the chronology of the Japanese, reigned in all, without interruption, for the space of two millions, three hundred, forty-two thousand, four hundred and sixty-seven years; from these it is pre­tended that the whole nation descends, without ex­ception; and the great pre-eminence of their Dairo arises from his being reputed the offspring of the eldest son of the first demi-god. The history of this dynasty of god-men is preserved in the archives of the priest of the Sinto; and exceeds, in puerile tales and romantic fictions, all that ever the most extra­vagant imagination engendered. In many towns and villages in Japan, memorials of these heroes are shewn; and their armour is hung up in their tem­ples for the edification and adoration of the multitude.

[Page 92]China is excessively vain of the numerous cen­turies its monarchy is supposed to have subsisted. The voluminous history of this empire begins, ac­cording to du Halde, with the reign of the emperor Fo-Hi, who must have lived about two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, at a time when the Assyrians were possessed of a series of astronomical observations. Notwithstanding the obscurity of this origin, the Chinese chronology descends from the reign of Yao in an uninterrupted succession of twenty-two dynasties to our times: some of them even carry back the commencement of their empire to an aera far beyond the creation of the world. But this whole account, copied by fa­ther du Halde from Chinese superstition, and though for well-known reasons, supported by Voltaire, has been wholly overthrown by a very learned Tartar, a man free from all Chinese prejudices, Nyen-Hy-Jao, viceroy of Canton, and with it its vast superstruc­ture of vanity and pride.

The inhabitants of Indostan penetrate still deeper into the fabulous world. Bernier made many en­quiries of the learned men at Benares, a city on the Ganges, which he calls the Athens of India, about their chronology; they immediately and readily counted millions of years on their fingers to him, in order to mark their remote origin; and the an­tiquity of their Sanscrit, or the language of the [Page 93] learned, in which their God revealed his will to them through Brama, was fixed at many thousands of years.

The history of the Malabars extends to an infi­nite time: they will tell you of Darma, of Schoren, of Pandyen, and of many other kings, who must have lived long before the beginning of the world, according to our computation: but you must not ask them the names of princes who reigned only three hundred years ago, for of them they are to­tally ignorant.

The yet uncivilized inhabitants of Paraguay give to the moon the endearing appellation of mother; and when their parent is eclipsed, they run out of their huts with the greatest activity, and making the most hideous lamentations, they shoot a vast number of arrows into the air, in order to defend the moon from the dogs who attack her, and want to tear her in pieces, which they take to be the cause of the obscuration of that luminary, and the shooting continues till it resumes its wonted brightness.

The Swedes have a long table of kings, in an uninterrupted chain of succession from Noah down to his present Majesty. The Edda and Woluspo are, next to the holy Scriptures, esteemed the most valuable monuments of antiquity by every one who [Page 94] is a true Swede. Rudbeck, more concerned for the imaginary honour of his country than for his­toric truth, gives the Swedish monarchy a duration of twenty centuries before the birth of Christ: whereas Rabenius expresses his doubts whether Sweden was even peopled so late as the beginning of the fifth century; and that, even according to Dalin's hypothesis, Sweden only emerged from the ocean about four hundred years before our aera, The Laplanders derive their origin immediately from a god, who produced at the same time both their ancestor, and the ancestor of the Swedes; but the latter, in a violent thunder storm, crept under a tree for shelter, while the courageous progenitor of the Laplanders remained inflexible and intrepid, ex­posed to the whole force of the tempest under the scowling brow of heaven.

The pride which arises from the imaginary nobi­lity of a nation, flows from the same source with that founded on antiquity, for we always think our nobility more ancient the less we are acquaint­ed with its real age.

Nobility is in reality great and honourable, when it is built on our own merit, or upon the exalted virtues and transcendent actions of our ancestors; but the pride of nobility is ridiculous and absurd, when one only glories in a title or a coat of arms, [Page 95] and presumes so much on the deserts of one's fore­fathers, as to conceive that the acquisition of per­sonal esteem can be dispensed with. A noble birth, when accompanied by a weak understanding, pro­duces in the right honourable owner nought but arrogance; and self-conceit becomes noblemen who have the honour to be descended from heroes, and the misfortune to be dissimilar in every thing to the worthy founders of their race, as little as family pride does the man who boasts of the noble blood that runs in his veins, while he is without a pair of breeches.

In Spain, every farmer and every tradesman has his genealogical tables, which begin generally, as those of Welchmen do, at Noah's ark. This ima­ginary ancestry forbids a Spanish countryman to plough his own ground; labour is, in his opinion, only fit for slaves; and the man who works two hours during the day, is of greater consideration and more noble blood, than he who employs six out of the twenty-four in useful occupation: he therefore gets a foreigner to take off his hands, the agricul­tural part, and at the same time the profits arising from it, while he lounges at home thrumming over a tinkling guitar. But when such an illustrious pea­sant debases himself so far as to hold the plough, he yet knows how to give an air of grandeur to this mean employment; he sticks a couple of cocks' fea­thers [Page 96] in his hat, and has his cloak and sword lying beside him, so that as soon as he perceives a travel­ler or a stranger, he instantly abandons the plough, throws the cloak over his shoulders, claps on his toledo, strokes his mustachios, and struts over the field with the appearance of a cavalier taking the air. The common people in Spain think the French all beggars, because there is many a Frenchman who earns a livelihood there by manual labour: the Swiss will soon have the same reputation, for with heartfelt concern, even while now writing, I see whole droves of honest, sturdy, Roman Catholic Switzers, with their buxom wives and numerous children, pass by my windows in their way to Spain, to avoid, as they themselves say, starving at home.

The Florentine noblesse are uncommonly reserv­ed and haughty towards strangers, who cannot prove their nobility, and may, perchance, be mere tradesmen; yet it is an acknowledged fact, that there is a little window towards the street in every palace or large house in Florence, with an iron knocker and an empty flask hung over it, as a sign, that wine is to be sold there by the bottle. It is not thought inconsistent for a Florentine nobleman to sell a pound of figs, or half a yard of ribbon, or to take money for a bottle of sour wine; yet it would be a disparagement to his nobility, if he were to introduce a meritorious, but untitled Englishman, [Page 97] into a public company where every one, however insignificant otherwise, who is of any tolerable family, inherits, or assumes the title of prince, count, or marquis.

At Verona, the person who conducts strangers to visit what is worthy of remark in that city, is a de­cayed nobleman of one of the first families of the place. When one of my friends entered with this man into a coffee-house, he found his conductor was addressed, by his brother nobles, by the title of Excellence: such Eccellenza's abound in the public places of Naples, where they walk about in worn-out gold waistcoats, with well darned stock­ings.

In the mountains of Piedmont, and in the county of Nice, there are some representatives of very an­cient and noble families, reduced to the condition of common peasants, but they still retain the ancient pride of their houses, and boast of the noble blood that runs in their veins. A gentleman, in travelling through these mountains, was obliged to pass the night in the cottage of one of these rusticated nobles, who called to his son in the evening, "Chevalier, a tu donne a manger aux cochons?"

The nobles of the nation of the Natches, in Louisiania, stile the common people Miche Miche Quipi, which mean, stinkards; they themselves are, [Page 98] in different ranks, suns, noblemen, and honourable gentlemen: the suns are such as are descended from a man and woman, who pretended to have imme­diately issued from the sun; this man and woman became lawgivers to the Natches, from the com­monality of whom they ordained that their race should for ever be separated. In order, however, to prevent their blood being adulterated by any mixture with that of the lower ranks, and to pro­vide against the slippery conduct of their wives, they enacted, that nobility should only descend in the female line. Their children, both male and female, were stiled suns, and respected as such, but with this distinction, that in the males this privilege appertained only to one man, and became extinct at his death; the females were all born suns, and their male offspring are suns equally with their mothers, but the issue of these are not suns, but noblemen; their grandsons, honourable gentlemen; and their great grandsons, stinkards.

National pride, founded on imaginary antiquity, is, therefore, a great folly; which, however, many enlightened nations give into, and which pleases them as much as a genealogical parchment does a country gentleman, who, filled with ham and pease, plumes himself on his long line of ancestors.

Chapter VI. Of Religious Pride.

TRUE and false religion has ever been, among all nations, in narrow minds, an object of a particular pride, which soon becomes a branch of national pride: a bigot not only accounts his reli­gion the only true one, but hates and despises eve­ry other, and pronounces sentence of eternal dam­nation on all who do not think, in this respect, ex­actly as he does.

Religious pride consists in the prepossession we entertain of the infallibility of our religion, and the idea that it is the only one conducting to salvation; in consequence whereof the followers of every other doctrine are positively no other than steaks ready prepared for the devil's gridiron. A religion need not all be true to lead its followers to this point, for falsities are embraced with no less obstinacy than truths. But let the religion on which you pride yourself proceed immediately from the gospel of Jesus and his Apostles, and be of course true; yet to condemn others who have not had the same op­portunity of recei [...]ing instruction, or who have not [Page 100] the capacity to comprehend a system of religion which is diametrically opposite to all they have seen, heard, or been taught from their earliest youth, is, in my opinion, utter insanity.

Men ought not to pronounce so lightly on each other. The same God of love and charity will judge us all, and he will judge us according to the inte­grity and sincerity with which we shall have served him. If every one does not exactly take the nearest and best path, he is notwithstanding in a road that leads to the same end, which he will undoubtedly attain if he believes in revelation, whereby we are all taught to pass a virtuous and unspotted life, by which we become partakers of all the promises of religion. The hope of salvation is grounded on the moral character of a man, and not on his theology; not so much on his opinions and his knowledge, as on the worthiness, purity, and honesty of his life. In all religions, therefore, we may be really pious, if we habituate ourselves to the examination and purification of our hearts and conduct, and make the honour and service of that God whom we ac­knowledge, the chief motive of all our serious ac­tions^*.

[Page 101]That self-deception and prejudices, however, are no where so glaringly violent, as in religious matters, has been most justly a cause of universal complaint. Priests, of all religions, have ever vociferated to their followers over the whole world, "We only are in the right; it is our religion only that is the true one, and all others consist of nothing but the greatest absurdities, and the most abominable doctrines." Even in the church of love, gentleness, and long-suffering, every party and every sect anathematize the doctrine which differs but a hair's breadth from their own. One system refutes the theology main­tained and asserted by another system, and each dis­proves what the other affirms. There is scarcely any error that is not defended by one sect or other as an undoubted truth. Each party glories in its proofs, and derides its antagonists most triumphant­ly; each writes and affirms as if it were infallible, though they write and affirm the most contrary ten­ets; as the force of their arguments is derived from the country in which they are adduced; for what in one place is accounted a divine truth, is twenty miles off esteemed a most palpable falsehood.

All this appears to me the less extraordinary, as, according to the testimony of unprejudiced church historians, the spirit of party, of prepossession, and the opinion entertained of the sanctity and infalli­bility of the particular doctrine they adhere to, often [Page 102] so much dazzles divines of great erudition and pe­netration, that they overlook common sense in de­fending their opinions. It has often with the justest concern been observed, that disputes are continually entertained without foundation, and that the Bible is proved from a polemic system, instead of the sys­tem being proved from the Bible; that the Scriptures are often only known by the passages and quotations which have been adduced to confirm a certain profes­sion of faith by the teachers of that profession, in their sermons and writings; and when they have said such and such words occur in such a particular part of the Bible, it has been implicitly believed, nay, the quotation has been read in exactly the same ex­pressions, or the leaders of religious parties have distorted and mutilated the passages, taken words abstractedly, and without their connection, so that they have been wrested from their original mean­ing; and, when by torturing them, in every sense, with the most pitiful sophistry, they have at length adapted them to their own peculiar interpretation, immediately each party has set up a loud te deum for their imaginary victory.

And it is from such oracles, as from the purest springs, that most Christians seek to be informed of eternal truth; and thereby they only increase the bigotry and zeal which has been instilled into them, in their earliest youth, by their inconsiderate teachers: [Page 103] whatever they have been taught to look upon as holy, inviolable truths, always remain so; they find proofs where there are absolutely none, and hold the principles of their opponents to be futile and ungrounded, nay, irreligious and profane, before they have ever examined them. By this unreason­ableness of both sides their animosity increases, and combatants and controversies, errors, heresies, here­tics, and heretic revilers, multiply ad infinitum.

All sects and religious parties have accordingly conceived themselves infallible; each entertains the miserable opinion, that among all the many religious communities, theirs alone possess the knowledge of divine truth in its purity, without considering that, in some points, others may be nearer the truth than themselves. They reciprocally contemn, abhor, and reproach each other with blindness, obstinacy, hardness of heart, or deceit; they all believe them­selves in the straight road to Heaven, and that all others are wandering in the path that leads to hell and perdition; they all call upon the testimony of one omniscient God, which when it comes to be narrowly looked into, proves to be no other than the testimony of their own sect. Every man of confined understanding prides himself on his re­ceived opinions, and looks upon all who do not agree with him in religious principles, as impure and despicable; so that to revile another system of [Page 104] religion, always implies the praise of our own; for it ever is, in this respect, as with our watches; we all depend on the truth of the one we possess, which alone points out the exact time of the day, while all others go either too slow or too fast.

This conceit of the excellency of religious opi­nions is often carried so far, that all great men are held to belong to our own persuasion. The Turks are morally convinced that Adam, Noah, Moses, the Prophets, nay, Christ himself, were all good Mahometans; and according to the Alkoran, Abra­ham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a true believing Mussulman. In Voltaire's opinion, Fenelon is a deist. In that of the peasants in the neighbourhood of Naples, Virgil was a saint; and a little edifice near his grave, a chapel where he used to read mass.

On the other hand, a contempt for a different religion is often occasioned or increased by the ob­scurity and misconception of its rites and tenets. Tacitus says, that the Jews adore, in their holy of holies, the image of an ass; because an animal of that species had been their guide in the wilderness, when they had lost their way, and had brought them to fresh water when they were perishing with thirst. Plutarch relates, that the Jews pay divine honours to swine, because these creatures had taught [Page 105] them husbandry; that their feast of the tabernacles is celebrated in honour of Bacchus, and their sab­bath instituted for the like purpose. The customs of the very best among men, the primitive Chris­tians, either misunderstood, or wholly unknown, became handles for the most senseless contempt and the most cruel persecution: the Jews alledged they were guilty of the foulest crimes; the Heathens affirmed, that an ass, with eagle's talons, was the object of their adoration; that a new born in­fant, entirely covered over with consecrated flour, was presented, like some mystic symbol of initiation, to the knife of the proselyte, who, unknowingly, inflicted many a secret wound on the innocent vic­tim of his error; that as soon as the cruel deed was perpetrated, the sectaries drank up the blood, greedily tore asunder the quivering members, and pledged themselves to eternal secrecy, by a mutual consciousness of guilt. It was as confidently aver­red, that this inhuman sacrifice was succeeded by a suitable entertainment, in which intemperance served as a provocative to brutal lust; till at the ap­pointed moment the lights were extinguished, shame was banished, nature was forgotten, and, as acci­dent might direct, the darkness of the night was polluted by the incestuous commerce of sisters and brothers, of mothers and of sons; it was asserted that they threatened to involve in a general confla­gration the whole earth, and all the heavenly [Page 106] bodies, by means of their infernal magic: in fine, that they were murderers, adulterers, committers of incest, and enemies of the gods, of the emperor, of chastity, and of human nature.

It too often happens, that the revilers of a reli­gion, are not acquainted with it, because they hate it; and, vice versa, that they hate it, because they are unacquainted with it: they attribute to its profes­sors doctrines which, perhaps, they abhor, and in­stitutions of which they never once had an idea: they scatter the most contradictory and absurd ca­lumnies against the followers of an opposite creed, as we have already proved by many instances; to which I shall add but one more. A Franconian catholic of quality believed that his son, a very in­telligent young man, was infected with the princi­ples of Protestantism, as he was particularly, inqui­sitive and studious; as an antidote to this supposed venom, the right honourable, free, and imperial fool, hit upon the following precept, which he so­lemnly charged his son to observe, as he was setting out on his travels: "Take care, my son," says he, "to avoid the company of Protestant divines, for they are all Sodomites."

A people, who conceive they alone profess the true religion, will not only believe themselves under the immediate protection, and objects of the pecu­liar [Page 107] favour of the Supreme Being, but will express the most ill natured abhorrence for the followers of another religion, whom they even do not treat with common humanity. The Israelites always looked upon themselves as the Lord's anointed people; and in the time of our Saviour, they accounted the Sa­maritans unworthy of their regard or conversation; their Rabbins held it an unlawful and indecorous thing, either to request a favour of a Samaritan, or to accept of any civility from one of that sect. Ever to this day the Jews refuse to receive any wine from Christians, for fear the errors and vices of Christianity should be infused together with the liquor into their Hebraic purity. According to the precepts of the Talmud, no Jew must salute a Chris­tian without inwardly cursing him, nor wish him a good journey without a secret tacit addition, like that of Pharaoh to the Red Sea, or of Haman to the gallows.

The Mahometan religion is excellently adapted to instil into its followers the greatest arrogance. Mahomet, their holy prophet, is, according to the Turks, the man whom God and his angels daily conversed with; to whom the stars paid obeisance; whom the trees and stones advanced to greet; who split the moon with his finger; who made roasted shoulders of veal to speak; the apostle of the Lord, who in the twefth year of his divine [Page 108] mission was taken up into heaven, and was taught the secrets of Omnipotence from the mouth of Om­nipotence itself; add to this, the promises made by Mahomet, to all his followers, of the future splen­dour of his empire in this world, and the voluptu­ousness and magnificence of it in the next: hence it naturally follows, that a Turk entertains a sovereign contempt for all other humbler systems of religion.

The Turks, far removed from connecting them­selves with the followers of Ali, apply to them the most opprobrious epithets; they call themselves Sunni, or true believers; but these they stile Schias, which is as much as to say, a despicable and repro­bate sect. A Turk very seldom will affirm a no­torious falsehood; wherefore, whenever any proof is required of what he relates, his general answer is, "Dost thou think I am a Christian?" All who are not true believers are, in the eyes of the Turks, so many dogs, whose very approach would defile an orthodox Mussulman; on which account, no infidel is allowed to enter a certain tract of land situated between Mecca and Medina, which is so exceedingly holy, and the regulation which forbids its entrance to any but true believers so strictly observed, that should the ambassador or legate of any infidel prince, on his journey to Mecca, set his foot on this consecrated earth, the Xerif is obliged, by his office, to interdict him from advancing, and [Page 109] to order him to retire, and if he is not scared away by these menaces, to use violence. No Christian is allowed to reside in the whole of the country of Hejaz in Arabia, because the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are situated there. Neither Jews nor Christians are allowed in Egypt to be present at the opening of the canals of the Nile, lest the water should be kept back by their uncleanness.

In the bosom of Mahometanism too, as well as in the Christian religion, the several sects accuse and revile each other, that they have falsified and per­verted the doctrine of their prophet, by which the mutual hatred of the people is nurtured, and the idea of toleration exploded. The Persians annually cele­brate a festival in honour of their prophet Ali, in which two oxen are exhibited; the one, which they take care to be the strongest, is called Ali, and the other, always very inferior in strength to his anta­gonist, Omar; these are made to fight, and as Ali always obtains the victory, the spectators from thence conclude that they alone are orthodox Mahometans, and the Turks heretics. The Turks, on the other hand, maintain that the Persians are the identical saddle-asses on which the Jews are to canter away to hell at the day of judgment.

As the Mahometans are unjust towards the Chris­tians, so the latter are equally unjust towards the [Page 110] former. No Turk ever entertained the least doubt, or attempted to speak ill of the unity of the God­head; and yet they have very often in Christendom been called idolaters and worshippers of the stars; while they are such strenuous advocates for one God, that misunderstanding one of our fundamental doc­trines, they upbraid us with polytheism; and yet they have in many Christian books been stiled Pa­gans, and their empire Paganism.

The Arab, in the conviction that his caliph is infallible, laughs at the stupid credulity of the Tar­tar, who holds his Lama to be immortal. A fea­ther, a horn, a shell, the claw of a lobster, a root, or any thing else that has been consecrated by a few unintelligible words, is an object of adoration to the negroes, and the solemn prototype on which they take their oaths: they find in the earth they tread on an immense number of gods, and ridicule the Europeans for their poverty in this respect. Those who inhabit mount Bata believe, that whoever de­vours a roasted cuckow before his death is a saint; and, firmly persuaded of the infallibility of this mode of sanctification, deride the Indians, who drag a cow to the bed of a dying person, and pinching her tail, are sure, if by that method they can make the crea­ture void her urine in the face of the patient, he is immediately translated into the third heaven; they scoff at the superstition of the Tartarian princes who [Page 111] think their beatification secured, provided they can eat of the holy excrements of their Lama; and they ridicule the the Bramins, who for the better purifi­cation of their new converts, require them to eat cow dung for the space of six months; while these would, one and all, in their turn, if they were told the cuckow-method of salvation, as heartily de­spise and laugh at it.

In the kingdom of Tanjore there are Bramins, who deriving their origin from their god Brama, hold themselves superior to all earthly power; they are so very holy, that the bare touch of one of an inferior cast, a Parea, would defile them; nay, the latter must not presume to worship the same deities. These Bramins can in no case be punished with death, and are in possession of so many, and such extraordinary privileges that they rule without con­troul or opposition over the lower classes of the inhabitants of Malabar, who quietly submit to the mandates of these inflated and indolent priests

In Japan, the devotees of the sect of Insja-Fuse, had the same ridiculous idea of their own imma­culate sanctity, and retreated with abhorrence from any communication with other men. The priests of the Sinto, or primeval religion of Japan, are equally infected with the pride of this transcendent holiness, and avoid, with the utmost haughtiness, [Page 112] both the laity and the clergy professing the Budso, or new religion of Japan, whom they take great care to hold no correspondence with, which would be the lowest degradation of their dignity; while the natural reciprocal contempt of the Budso divines for those of the Sinto, is by no means inferior.

The Dairo, or pope of Japan, is respected almost as a god in his life-time: the earth is not worthy the touch of his feet, and the sun is not allowed the favour of shining on his head; the holiness of his hair, his beard, and his nails, is so great, that to cut off or pare them is not permitted, except dur­ing his sleep; for the Japanese believe, that all that which the body of their Dairo then loses is only sto­len from him, and that such a robbery is by no means so sacrilegious as to take them from him while awake, for that would argue in him a too near ap­proach to mortality. In former times the Dairo was obliged to sit a few hours every morning on his throne, like a statue, without moving his hands, his feet, his head, his eyes, or any part of his body, in order that the empire might enjoy the most profound tranquility; pestilence, famine, or war, would, agreeable to the opinion then entertained, immediately have afflicted that unlucky province to­wards which the Dairo cast a look. The first who was properly emperor of Japan, was stiled the man of sublime extraction, the prince of heaven, the son [Page 113] of the gods; and these titles have remained to the Dairo, who on his death enjoys, in common with the Roman emperors, the honour of an apotheosis; while the Cubosoma, or worldly sovereign of Japan, who is the territorial lord, like the present kings of France, Spain, Portugal, and Naples, contents him­self with the more solid honours of earthly power.

The court of his Japanese holiness is composed of highly illustrious personages, who though they are not above exercising themselves in the manu­facture of straw-baskets, horse-shoes, or any other little handicraft, to keep themselves from starving; nevertheless, proud of their pedigree from the first demi-god of the second dynasty of Japan, they treat the rest of mankind as dogs; nay, the dignity, sanctity, and purity of every thing that relates to the Dairo is so great, that the meanest servant boys who perform the lowest offices in the temple, and in the religious ceremonies of Japan, and whose station exactly answers to that of candle-snuffer in a play-house, are equally vain of their super-eminence over the rest of the world. As to the universal opinion entertained by the Japanese of the Chris­tians, I shall only illustrate the low degree of estima­tion in which they are held by the obligation they imposed on the Dutch, to cast all their dead into the sea, off the harbour of Nangasaki, for their carcases were deemed unworthy a burial in the soil [Page 114] of Japan, although those lucre-loving souls assured them they were not Christians, but only Hollanders.

Thus do mankind ridicule and despise, execrate and condemn each other, because each conceives himself to belong to the only religion which leads to salvation, or to be a being of exclusive and un­defiled holiness. The total separation of our own, from every other religious society, is esteemed ne­cessary and indispensable to sanctification, and we are, therefore, never able to be impartial or equita­ble towards others; this separation; the yet exist­ing predominant opinion in every sect of the infalli­bility of its own tenets; the unhappy spirit of per­secution of many respectable theologians; the un­timely zeal, which incites us blindly to [...]pel all attacks on the doctrines embraced by our r [...]lations and progenitors; and, above all, thr great multi­tude of holy champions, who are continually on foot, armed at all points, ready to throw the gauntlet of defiance, and inconsiderately and unmercifully to lay about them, like the too zealous Peter, against every one who might shew the least design of at­tacking the principles of their church: all this compels mankind reciprocally to abhor and condemn their fellow-creatures; because one set chuses to jog on to heaven by a different road than the other, and which, alas! is carried to such extravagance, that, among other instances, a reformed clergyman, de­tected [Page 115] preaching his articles of belief in France, would be hanged; and a jesuit, if caught in Sweden, would be emasculated.

Thus do we, poor miserable worms! in our little span of life, presume to hate and persecute our brother, only because we happen to differ from him in opinion respecting an unnecessary, and nearly imperceptible refinement, or a matter that is be­yond human conception: thus do we, creatures of the dust! arrogate the power of circumscribing the councils of the Almighty, and presumptuously dare to stamp our passions and prejudices, our priests and priestly pride, with the counterfeit image of the Lord of Heaven and of Earth.

Chapter VII. Of National Pride, as arising from a supposed Liberty, Valour, Power, or Consideration.

HERE and there we may find nations who, like the ancient Greeks, overvalue themselves on ac­count of their real freedom; or like the modern in­habitants of Greece, treasure up the memory of the former liberty of their country, on which they equal­ly pride themselves.

The most notorious slaves in Italy boast of their glorious freedom. This infatuating dream begets a most ludicrous elevation of mind, which is the de­rision of the substantial republican citizen, whose consolation does not, like that of these conceited slaves, consist in mere empty sounds or unmeaning words. A citizen of San Marino knows nothing that can be compared with ancient Rome, save the petty republic of which he is a member. The nobles of Genoa, who are almost all engaged in trade, out of mercantile jealousy, make use of the most inte­rested and selfish policy, and every kind of artifice, to keep the coasts, which are under their dominion, in poverty and dependence, in order that the trade [Page 118] of the capital may not be injured; yet the poor devils at San Remo and Noli believe most implicitly that they are free.

Another effect of ideal liberty, is the laughable contempt and opposition which a conquered people have for the laws and customs of their conquerors, which, though ever so eligible in themselves, it would be disgraceful for them to adopt. The English have taken the trouble of making smooth, broad, and straight roads both in Ireland and in Minorca, yet they have never been able to per­suade either the Irish or the Minorcans to use these infinitely more commodious roads in prefer­ence to their old, crooked, or miry lanes, in which, stupidly averse to innovation, they continue to plunge with an elevated mien and jaded body, proud of these still remaining vestiges of their imaginary independence.

A third effect, resulting from the idea of freedom, which is the chief glory of a certain great nation in Europe, is the neglect of ceremony, and the opinion that the dictates of good breeding need not be farther followed, than as they are consistent with our own convenience, or our own inclinations; in consequence of which latitude, it is no harm to throw one's self back in an elbow chair, when tired of sitting upright; you may invite your friends to [Page 119] eat and drink with you at all hours, and at all sea­sons, whether to breakfast, dinner or supper, or whether you have roast or boiled meat to give them: you may frankly say the wine is good for nothing, when it is really so; and, when a lady happens in a coach, with several gentleman, to feel a certain pressing want of nature, she may, consistently with the freedom of her nation, send for a chamber-pot from the next house, and ease herself in the coach without blushing^*.

The pride founded upon imaginary valour, ap­pears in an excessive estimation of our own courage. [Page 120] and an unjust contempt for our enemies. A nation that thinks itself brave, when it does not possess any bravery, or not in such a superlative degree as it imagines, looks down with conceited vanity on its foes, which no disappointment, no defeat, no loss no unequivocal proof of its weakness, can remove.

Tigranes was sunk in the deepest indolence and security, when Lucullus marched to attack him. It was firmly believed that the Roman general, as soon as he came within sight only of his formidable enemy, would be panic struck, and fly even beyond Asia. The Romans appeared: Tigranes expressed his vexation that all their generals did not come to face him at once; his army amounted to two hun­dred and sixty thousand men, the Roman legions to scarcely ten thousand; a handful of men, too insignificant and too contemptible to be worth the regard of the numerous host of Armenians. Ti­granes observed to his courtiers, that they came in too great number for ambassadors, and by far too few for enemies: there was not one of his generals, who did not request his leave to go and catch this covey that had imprudently ventured it­self within the fowler's reach. By break of day, the next morning, when the Armenians were intent on surrounding the Romans, they perceived a move­ment in the camp of Lucullus. Tigranes thought he was about to begin his flight; suddenly the [Page 121] eagles of the first legion wheeled to the right, and the cohorts followed them. Are these people coming against us? said Tigranes, awakened at once from his long trance. They immediately fell upon the Ar­menians, and soon, as ordered by Lucullus, they engaged in close fight, which quickly disconcerted and routed this large host, who were only compe­tent to combat at a distance: the cavalry fell back on the infantry, and put it into disorder, and the whole army was, in a short time, completely routed; the battle did not last longer than that of Rosbach, and this signal defeat of the Armenians cost the Romans no more than six killed, and about one hun­dred wounded.

An imaginary valour of another kind, is that of the Abyssinians. When father Lobo waited on a king of that country to pay his respects, just as he was about to open his mouth, about twenty sturdy fellows fell upon him and gave him a hearty drub­bing; the father flew to the door, where he was most respectfully treated, and was told, that this beating was an immemorial custom, which had been adopted to shew to every stranger, that the Abys­sinians were the most courageous people of the earth, and that therefore every other ought to be humbled before them.

[Page 122]The pride arising from imaginary power, consists in too high an estimate of our strength. Xerxes, for example, caused chains to be thrown into the sea in order to fetter it, and had three hundred stripes inflicted on its turbulent waves for having broken down one of his bridges. He wrote to mount Athos, "Haughty Athos, thou who liftest up thy head to the skies, presume not to oppose to my labourers rocks through which they cannot pene­trate, or I will hew thee down, and hurl thee into the ocean." Oriental pride retains, in our days, the same character of hyperbolical inflatation; so that to take their expressions according to their lite­ral meaning, the Asiatic princes would supply on earth the place of the Divinity in every point. The king of Malacca stiles himself lord of the winds, and of the eastern and western oceans. The Mogul as­sumes the title of conqueror of the world, and king of the earth; and the grandees of his court are no less than rulers of the thunder-storm, steersmen of the whirlwind, or exterminators of hosts.

The petty insignificant tribe of the Natches was, according to their own tradition, the most powerful nation of the continent of North America; its chief nobility consisted of five hundred Suns, under the control of one great Sun. The present sovereign of this little people has a particularity in his pride, which cannot fail to excite much merriment: every [Page 123] morning he stalks out of his hovel, bids the sun good morrow, offers him a pipe to smoke, and points out to him with his finger the course which he is to take that day.

In like manner a too exalted opinion entertain­ed of the national consideration constitutes pride. It has been observed, that there is hardly a Frenchman who does not attribute to himself part of the honour of the Siam embassy, of which he is particularly vain. The French, in this respect, often render the national pride which is otherwise justly founded on the grandeur of their kings, or the conduct and fame of their ministers and gener­rals, ridiculous, by applying to themselves the per­sonal merit of those eminent characters. A French colonel, once passing through Brussels as a traveller, and having a leisure day, took it into his head to go to the great assembly; he was told, that it was held at the palace of a prince; tant mieux, says he; "What is that to me?"—"But princes only frequent it, sir, and unless you are a prince"—"Oh, these princes are the most good natured people in the world," interrupted the officer; "when the city was taken last year, I had a dozen of them dancing attendance in my antichamber, and they were all excessively complaisant."

[Page 124]The abbot Mauri in Switzerland is a prince of the holy Roman empire, and he has four great officers of state; his hereditary marshals are the noble and illustrious lords of Thurn; his here­ditary chamberlains, the lords of Wittenbach; his hereditary cup-bearers, the noble family of the Rup­plins; and his hereditary grand carvers, that of Niderost: while the salary of the chief of those offi­cers, the hereditary marchal is twenty florins⁵ a year. Strangers are invited to court to dinner, which though served up in great state, is no better than a tradesman's ordinary. His serene highness has his own covered body-dishes set before him, which no one of the guests is to touch, he drinks of his own high and illustrious body-wine; while both the strangers and the domestics must be content with new wine of the last vintage.

When the Khan of Tartary, who has not so much as a house, and who subsists solely on rapine, has finished his repast of marc's-milk and horse-flesh in his tent, he causes an herald to proclaim, that all kings, princes, and potentates of the earth, now have his permission to go to dinner.

But I do not recollect a more glaring instance of pride, arising from an imaginary consideration, nor [Page 125] do I think it can well be carried farther, than in a negro king on the coast of Guinea, whose memo­ry has been perpetuated by the celebrated author of the Persian Letters. Some Frenchmen who landed in his dominion to buy fresh provisions, were car­ried before the king, who was administering the weighty concerns of his realm under a tree; he sat on his throne, which was a log of wood, with the same majesty and consequence as if it had been the golden seat of the Great Mogul, glittering with jewels; close to him stood his regiment of body­guards, consisting of three or four fellows armed with hedge-stakes; his canopy of state was an um­brella held over his head; both his majesty and his royal consort were embellished with the insignia of their regal power, a few copper rings and trin­kets, and they shone forth above their subjects, in the jetty glossiness of their skins. This august monarch, understanding the native country of his visitors, asked with much seriousness, "Am not I much talked of in France?"

I could have added numberless other instances of folly appertaining to the kind of pride I have treated of in this chapter, in which I have not at all pleased myself; for it seems to me both too short, and too barren, instead of being of a proper length, and full of striking remarks; but I have just thought of the answer given by Vitellius to a very critical ques­tion [Page 126] of the Emperor Caligula, who was shameless enough, not only publicly to maintain that he was descended from the gods, but to confirm this idea, he asked Vitellius, if he had not seen him in bed with the moon? Vitellius, with downcast eyes, answered, "Most illustrious emperor, you gods are only visible to gods, the feeble sight of mortal man cannot reach you."

Chapter VIII. Of Pride, Resulting from Ignorance of Foreign Affairs.

THE utter ignorance of foreign affairs, is a soft cushion from which a nation, reposing in ease and self-complacency, casts an indolent look through the medium of self-conceit, on every other; despises what it cannot comprehend, and shews its want of knowledge and judgement as ridiculously as the Paris bookseller, who hearing something of the King of Prussia's attachment to books, asked with an appearance of great astonishment, "What! has the king of Prussia also a library?"

The Italians, though in our times they know bet­ter, were long persuaded that all the inhabitants of the countries beyond the Alps were mere barba­rians; since, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the sciences first settled themselves in Italy, and thence spread abroad into other countries. An Italian writer said of the Germans, that their brains did not lie in the head, as was the case with other people, but in their back and shoulders; and their universities might be compared to stables where Minerva kept her mules. Baillet, who quotes [Page 128] this sentence, adds, that it is therefore not to be wondered at, that the wit and spirit which we ad­mire in the productions of the modern Italians, as well as those of the ancient Romans and Greeks, are not to be found in German poetry. Martinelli, another Italian author, who some years ago lived in London, affirms, that Germany has not, to this day, produced either a poet or a physician. It is but a little while ago since I read in a pamphlet, published by one Count Roncali, an Italian physi­cian, that inoculation had not been adopted by any nation of learning. Did not the right honourable scribbler then know that the practice is become general throughout Europe, and that, in our en­lightened times, every European nation that is in its right senses, takes for itself the lead in litera­ture, and that all unanimously assign to the English the second place among whom inoculation is uni­versally practised?

The Germans have by most people been abused, as the beasts of burden of the literary world, the cinder-sifters and hod-men, raking together and preparing the mortar and materials for the edifice of letters. I read a few years ago, in one of the best English reviews, that the German writers have, from time immemorial possessed the same privi­lege with theologists, that of writing many books, and saying little in them; that they are famous for scraping together matter wherewith to fill many [Page 129] unwieldy folios, spinning out their works to a for­midable length, and wearying the patience of their reader without informing his understanding; and finally, that every German head contained a con­fused medley of books, ever in a litter, and the more looked into the less understood. Full as inju­rious would it be in me to call all the English bar­barians, only because, even in these days of know­ledge, at the public disputations at Oxford, on Ash-Wednesday, a young English pedant, drest out like a masquerader at Shrove-tide, mounts the ros­trum, and lifts the impenetrable shield of Aristote­lian quirks and quibbles, against the leaden darts which his opponents, representing the sons of Scotus, Burgerdicius, and Smiglesius, aim at the doughty champion.

A minister of state in Persia knows as much of European affairs, as he does of what is transacted in the moon. Most of the Persians think our part of the world is a small island in the northern waters, which produces nothing that is good or beautiful; for why else, say they, do the Europeans fetch such things from us, if they were to be got in their own country?

The Chinese understand by the four quarters of the globe little more than their empire; they have the most unbounded contempt for all other coun­tries, [Page 130] and they entertain a notion that all the hea­venly bodies watch over China alone, without any kind of concern for any other land. They take the earth to be a vast horizontal square; and they look upon China, which they say lies in the middle, as occupying not only the best, but the largest portion of it. Accordingly they stile their country Chong-que, or the kingdom of the middle, and Tien-Hia, or all under the heavens. A jesuit mis­sionary, to flatter these opinions, in a map of the world which he made for the Chinese, placed China in the middle, an artifice well worthy of the inven­tion of a jesuit. As to their own maps, in them the Chinese give their empire the greatest extent on earth, and scatter the rest of the world in the form of very small islands, here and there all round China. Their geographers give these islands or kingdoms the most ludicrous names, and tell the most ridiculous stories about them; one they call Seao­ginque, or the region of the dwarfs, of whom they relate, that they are obliged to live as closely toge­ther as bees in a hive, for fear of being snatched away by the eagles and vultures; another is Chu­ensinque, or the kingdom whose inhabitants have a large hole in their breasts, into which they put a stick, and carry one another about on their backs: and a pack of the like nonsense. However, since the Chinese, by their communication with us, know a little more of Europe, they have advanced it in their maps to the size of one of the Canary islands.

[Page 131]All other nations must esteem it a very great honour, if they are admitted to be accounted the subjects of China; they are, themselves, exceed­ingly shy of sending any ambassadors abroad, be­cause they look upon an embassy, a present, or even a letter from any foreign country, as a most posi­tive proof of respectful submission, and an acknow­ledgement of the right of China to exact tribute of that nation; accordingly its name is immediately inscribed in a register kept for the purpose, and appears in the annals of China as a tributary king­dom, the number whereof is very considerable; as every man who brings a letter to China from any prince or state, is called an ambassador, and his sovereign a slave of China,

The emperor Yong-Tching said in a speech to the jesuits: "I am the absolute lord of the king­dom of the middle; all other states, great and small, send me tribute; it amuses me sometimes to instruct them; if they receive and attend to my lessons, well and good, if not, I turn them adrift." It was in 1758 that the jesuits tried to bring the ministers of the Chinese empire to admit of an em­bassy from France, but they were refused it, as they had secretly given them to understand, "that his most christian majesty was not tributary to the empe­ror of China; that the presents which the emperor might send to the king of France, would not be looked on as proceeding solely from the bounty of [Page 132] the imperial donor, and that the king's letters were not to be accounted petitions, nor the emperor's answers commands."

The Japanese are fools of the same stamp. Niphon, the name which they commonly give to their country, imports light of the sun, because be­ing unacquainted with any lands to the eastward, they suppose the sun rises to them the first; they are ignorant of the spheric form of the earth, and that every country lies east and west with respect to them. Another name of Japan which occurs in their books, is Tenka; but this seems to be not so much a proper name, as a figurative appellation, which is adopted by the Japanese out of vanity: it means, the region that is under the heavens; whence, likewise, comes the title that is also given to the emperor of Japan, of Tenka-sama, or the monarch under the heavens; which is very applica­ble to the idea formerly entertained by this people, that theirs was the only inhabited country, them­selves the only human beings, and all other lands the residence of devils and unclean spirits.

We thus see, that the less any nation is acquaint­ed with foreign affairs, the more it exalts itself; and its vanity finds its account in this ignorance, on which it grounds the most foolish contempt for all other countries.

Chapter IX. Of Pride, as arising from Ignorance in general.

AS ignorance and a want of self-know­ledge engender self-complacency and an unjust con­tempt for others; so the pride that results from ge­neral ignorance in a nation, is the same with too high an estimation of its own knowledge, however contracted and defective this may be.

The French have been accused, that they think their laws are so excellent, that they ought to be followed by every other nation; they would not be so vain of their laws, if the multitude knew that there is scarcely any knowledge of the law of nature or of nations to be met with in France, where we should the most expect to meet with it; that in the numerous schools and universities with which that kingdom abounds, where so many things of no real worth are taught with the greatest assiduity and pe­dantry, there is not one professorship for the law of nations; and that of course the French are the on­ly nation who seem to believe that this science is of no utility.

[Page 134]They would not, I say, be so vain of their laws, if the opinion of one of their own great men was more commonly known among them; who main­tains that their whole legislature, formed out of the confusion of the feudal system, is a monstrous and unwieldy structure, which resembles a most incon­sistent heap of ruins; that the law, which ought to be the exact counterpart of universal order, is on the contrary exceedingly contradictory to it, and instead of uniting its subjects, divides them; making as it were, a hundred different states in the bosom of one kingdom.

The haughty English are equally blind in this respect; these self-sufficient islanders look on their common law, which is the sole and best guide fol­lowed in the royal courts of justice, as the only rule of right, and such a wonder of perfection, that Chancellor Fortescue, in the work he published in 1469 in praise thereof, holds it almost a sin to doubt its all-sufficiency; nevertheless, this rule of law is said to be founded, for the most part, on maxims adopted long ago, and the consequences deducible from them have all a legal authority, although they are not unfrequently contradictory and inconsistent; and what is more, although England maintains a standing army of upwards of forty thousand lawyers, yet it may be confidently asserted, that there is no country on earth where a more deplorable ignorance [Page 135] of their own laws prevails than there. Near three cen­turies ago, it required twenty years study to acquire a due knowledge of the laws of England; and yet, by the villainous manoeuvres of the unworthy pro­fessors of the law, the numerous proposals made for reformation of the common law, and the commis­sioners several times appointed by parliament for the purpose of improving the system of jurispru­dence, have all been frustrated and rendered of no avail: nay in 1659^*, the lawyers obtained a pro­mise, in return for a contribution of one hundred thousands pounds sterling, that they should remain in the undisturbed possession of all the juridical abuses, and in the same year, William Cole wrote a treatise, to prove that the lawyers in England were the greatest rogues and cheats in the king­dom.

Spain produces in its hot and parched climate some very keen and penetrating geniuses; but the [Page 136] ever predominating love of the marvellous, which is so remarkable in this nation, distorts and spoils nature, the only model for all that is sublime and beautiful. The sciences remain always in Spain, for very obvious reasons, in a very wretched situa­tion; yet they entertain such lofty ideas of their own superiority in this respect, that it long was a prevalent opinion among the Spaniards, that God conversed with Moses on Mount Sinai in the Spanish language, and revealed to them long ago all the many secrets and hidden mysteries of nature which yet are the objects of the diligent researches and inquiries among the most learned philosophers of the world. Conformably to this tradition, they give some of their colleges of learning the most in­flated appellations: one is called the Olympian and another the Radient College, or Academy.

The judgment of a whole nation must not be arraigned on account of the enthusiastic exclama­tions of some hot-headed divines. Yet the innu­merable panegyrics, which, from the introduction to Torrubia's Natural History of Spain, published in 1754, have something in them very aptly charac­teristic of the national character of the Spaniards, although I very readily make allowance for some exceptions: one of these encomiasts, father Hiero­nimus of Salamanca, exclaims: "Even if I had a hundred tongues, and if each of them, nay if every [Page 137] individual part of my body, every joint, every vein, was endowed with the faculty of the most eloquent language; yet how very unfit, how totally unable should I be to express the delight which the perusal of this Natural History afforded me." In the confi­dence that all Europe pays the most profound atten­tion to him, the reverend father goes on; "Behold, says he, Torrubia, the crowned lion of Spain, the modern Geryon, a philosopher who has surprised nature in the fact, a wonder of literature, to whom nothing rises superior, save his own immortal Natu­ral History. He is the favoured child of providence, who bestowed every advantage on him, adding as an enchantment to them all, the inestimable blessing of being born in Spain. Happy favoured Spain! thou faithful genius of our nation, thou art ever constant, ever enlightened, ever invincible, ever triumphant over ignorance and error!"

The Chinese are highly celebrated for learning, and it is said they are exceedingly vain of it; but as it appears to me, it is of their ignorance that they are vain; the most extravagant notions are formed of China, as the travellers who have given us an ac­count of it are often very partial to the wonderful, yet their relations, at the same time, carry very much an air of probability. Look on the large and magnificent libraries of China, the astonishing num­ber of their Colleges, of their graduates, of their [Page 138] observatories, the extreme attention which they pay to the contemplation of the heavens; consider, that learning is the only road to honour and dignity; that talents and knowledge form the only rule of preferment; that by the fundamental laws of the empire, which have been most strictly observed for a long series of centuries, none but a man of learn­ing can ever attain to the dignity of governor of a city or a province; and that all the courts of justice must likewise be filled with persons of literary abili­ties; add to this, that the customs and manners of of the Chinese have remained invariable, amidst the greatest revolutions; that their conquerors even have adopted them; that the reign of the law has never been suspended or weakned; that their empire has seen the downfal of every other; and that amidst the ruins of the world, their's only has remained erect and unshaken; and you will certainly be in­duced to believe that the Chinese excel all other nations in every kind of human knowledge; yet try it by the touchstone of candid and serious ex­amination, and the enchantment will vanish, and the nation so much extolled above others will sink below the general level, and appear in a very mor­tifying point of view.

The Chinese study their own language most at­tentively, and well they may, for to understand it perfectly, it would employ the greatest part of their [Page 139] lives. After they have attained a knowledge of the grammar, they apply themselves to History, Law, and Morality. Whoever wishes to be created doc­tor, and who thus strives to attain one of the chief dignities of the empire, must be thoroughly ac­quainted with the language; he must be able to write, which is by no means an easy matter; he must be able to prepare a discourse in the best style, on morality, or on the art of government; and in the Chinese academies, a chief part of education consists in the art of making a genteel bow, of giving or receiving a cup of tea with a suitable grace, how to walk, and how to carry a parasol with a becoming air. One of their books of instruction, on these im­portant points alone, contains three thousand rules.

This is all very well, say the champions for Chinese superiority; yet it is only by possessing a thorough knowledge of their language that they can become acquainted with their own laws and customs, with the actions of their forefathers, and the history of their empire; but they do not attend to the circum­stance, that many a Chinese student dies of old age before he has learned to read. Their nonsensical pedantry, with respect to external appearances, is held by some to be very important and praise-wor­thy; the reverence they shew, by bowing to the ground, or kneeling before each other, on saying good morrow or good night, is admired and inter­preted [Page 140] as a proof of the esteem they have both for themselves and others. It is alledged, that this knowledge of the exact measure of respect due to eve­ry rank and every ramification of rank, acts as a great restraint on personal pride; that it preserves a due distinction between the different orders, and pre­vents equality among mankind; that it bows the neck of the man who is but a hair's breadth lower in rank, in obedience to his superior. But these ar­guments are only worthy of such as are born and educated slaves, and certainly ought not to be addu­ced in honour of the Chinese; for mutual esteem exists in the heart, and not in a graceful bow or an unmeaning compliment.

The Chinese are in reality unfit for the more useful arts and sciences, notwithstanding they appear proficients in them; they know a little of every thing, but nothing in perfection. Almost all the arts have been known and practised in China for time immemorial, but they remain in the same state as they were at their commencement; and of some they are wholly ignorant.

Their constitution and government have been ex­tolled above all others in the world; yet the people are every where the prey to rogues of quality, and are often in danger of starving, by the iniquitous administration of their protectors and parents, as the [Page 141] governors there are indiscriminately styled. Very good laws, it is true, are enacted in China, as well as in other countries, but they are not observed; for the great panacea, gold, makes amends for the worst infractions of them. To be sure, the Chinese government so far resembles the patriarchal authori­ty, to which they pretend it is finally reducible, that their Mandarins, like loving fathers, bestow many severe drubbings upon their children, whom, as to any other proofs of paternal love and care, they very generously leave to pine away in misery, for fear the population of the empire should become too great. Politics are so little known and understood there, that the Chinese have no conception of any other government than a despotic monarchy, and they can never be brought to comprehend the possi­bility of the existence of a republic; and their civil laws are often diametrically opposite to the natural and most important duties of life. In short, let their patriarchal form of government, which has been so much cried up, appear ever so mild and favourable to its subjects in theory or in practice, it is certain that there is no nation on earth more plundered, op­pressed, and robbed by the great, than the Chinese.

Their system of morality has been exalted to the skies; yet it evidently aims at subjecting even the hearts of the people to the will of a despot, and therefore publicly makes morality subservient to policy. This error of the Chinese legislator has [Page 142] rendered manly virtue an object of indifference to the people, while the care taken to enforce obedi­ence and submission to one head, has likewise intro­duced a spirit of hypocrisy and dissimulation, very inconsistent with good morals. These inculcate and produce an artless sincerity, and an undeceiving candour, in both of which the Chinese are remark­ably deficient; for there is no nation upon the face of the earth more given to low cunning and every kind of fraud; they are certainly most ostenta­tiously virtuous: the women do not only shun the company of men, on every visible occasion, but the greatest care is taken that they should not come to­gether even in the invisible world; for the body of a female is carefully deposited at a proper distance from that of a male in their burial places; but who is ignorant, that the more shew is made of vir­tue and chastity, the more scope is left for suspi­cion, and that where appearances pass current for honour and honesty, little of the realities is to be found?

Nor, finally, am I surprised, that the Chinese in­dulge in the most wanton excesses; that they thrust their children out of doors, without remorse; that they bribe their midwives to drown their girls as soon as born in a tub of water, when they sup­pose their maintenance would be too expensive; for how can they believe, in earnest, in the ex­cellence of virtue, when almost all their learned [Page 143] men deny the immortality of the soul; maintain that matter and nature are immeasurable, infinite, and uncreated; that their operations and motions are uninterrupted, irresistible, and without begin­ning or end; and deduce from the continuance of their agency, the production both of souls and bo­dies, the duration of whose existence again, they suppose, is in proportion to the part every being can seize of the universal substance; who, in fact, are downright atheists?

They do not meddle much with natural philoso­phy, nor are they able to form a proper conception of any one operation of nature. Their astronomy is very ancient; they are said to have studied hard at it for four thousand years, and yet, before the arrival of the jesuits, they could not make a correct almanac. The court of mathematicians, consisting of a president, two assessors, and many subordi­nate mandarins, superintends all matters of astrono­my, and publishes the imperial calendar, by which the people are acquainted what days and what hours are lucky or unlucky. Their most important busi­ness is to predict eclipses, the calculations of which they present to the emperor, who sends them to the court of customs, whence they are distributed through all the provinces of the empire, that the appropriate ceremonies, appointed in such cases, may every where be duly observed. These cere­monies [Page 144] are of great consequence; for they consist chiefly in beating of drums continually during the eclipse, while the people raise their voices in howl­ings and lamentations, in order, by this diabolical noise, to drive away the dragon, who is supposed to be about to devour the sun or the moon.

In medicine, it is pretended, the Chinese can per­form wonders; they are, perhaps, as good as our quacks, and indeed, not inferior to such of our European doctors, who attempt to persuade the public, they can put disease and death to flight with a single pill; but they are entirely ignorant of anatomy, and have the most wretched ideas respect­ing the properties and utility of the several parts of the body; they of course know nothing of the proximate causes of distempers, the knowledge of which, is the only true foundation to proceed upon in the cure of them. They are supposed to possess the most extraordinary knowledge of that part of medicine relating to the pulse; like our water-doc­tors and and palmisters, they secretly make the most exact enquiries respecting the situation and circum­stances of the patient, before they venture to pro­nounce with certainty, what such or such a kind of pulsation denotes; and if the evils they have pre­dicted do not come to pass, they know how to help the patient to them, for the honour of their know­ledge in the art of prognostication. The maxims of [Page 145] this art are very limited, regular, and systematic; if the pulse beats hard, the kidneys must be inflam­ed; if it is something like the pecking of a bird, the patient must die the next morning between ten and eleven o'clock; in fact, the whole of the art of medicine in China consists in this knack of lying with a good grace, from the state of the pulse, and in the knowledge of some simples, which descend from father to son, and in the hands of such fools, naturally become, without exception, specifics for almost all disorders.

Of their art of war, some judgment may be formed from the circumstance that there is always a gownsman, that is to say, a man of letters, who ac­companies their armies, and to whom all their gene­rals are subordinate. On a march, the man in the long robe is placed in the front, but when a bat­tle is fought, he takes his stand some miles in the rear; provided only, that he may be near enough to communicate his orders to the army under his controul, and at the same time so situ­ated, as to lead the van of the run aways, if his party be defeated.

The Chinese are praised for their inventive genius in the arts; and yet no Chinese artist can make a single firelock; for it is but a few years ago that they made use of match-locks, and did not know [Page 146] what flints were. They have yet not been able to learn how to repair a watch when it is out of order; it is dead, they say, and barter it away for a living one. They imagine they have invented music, and have even brought it to perfection; what they have, is too bad to be called music, it is even said to be worse than the French^*. As to their painting, it possesses no excellence but a brilliancy of colouring, and is otherwise formal, spiritless, and absurd; they caricature their own faces, and put themselves in the most grotesque postures, although they in fact look pretty well, except their bellies which are too pro­minent. They have an utter dislike to European manners, dresses, and customs: and are so far averse to our architecture, that it was with the greatest difficulty the Chinese builders could be brought to erect the church, that the jesuits formerly had in the emperor's palace at Pekin, according to the model sent from Europe. Although they cannot but look with astonishment at the size and structure of our ships, they think themselves affronted as well as scoffed at, when they are invited to imitate them. Their poetry is excessively phlegmatic and insipid, without any flights to please the imagination, or in­terest to affect the passions. They are, moreover, said to have invented the theatre; but in the Thes­pian art too, they have not got beyond the very [Page 147] first rudiments. And with all this ignorance, their contempt for other nations is so decided, that they will not adopt the most simple, and evidently the most useful inventions of the Europeans; nay, they are so averse even to their assistance, that at a fire in Canton, they chose rather to suffer the greatest part of the town to be burnt, than permit the En­glish sailors of Commodore Anson's ship to extin­guish the flames, which they were not able to do themselves, and were sorely offended at the alacrity of the tars on that occasion, because there was no formal permission given by the viceroy to stop the conflagration.

But the Chinese, it is pretended, understood all the necessary arts, and such as are of real utility, upwards of four thousand years ago; and notwith­standing we now boast so much of the progress we have made in those arts, we at that period could neither read nor write. It has, however, been omitted to be mentioned, what particular arts of such essential usefulness could flourish among the Chinese, when they were even unpractised in the primary simple occupations of hunting and fish­ing; when they could hardly provide themselves food; when they had neither clothes nor dwellings: for all these arts were not only totally unknown to them, according to their own acknowledgment, in the pretended reign of the emperor [...]-Hi, but they [Page 148] were mere savages near a thousand years afterwards, when the Egyptians taught them to write, and gave them laws and customs. To this again is replied, dispute as long as you please about the fourteen emperors who reigned before Fo-Hi, all you may say will end in the acknowledgement, that China was then very populous, and was governed by a regular code of laws. Now the annals of these very times, declared to be wholly fabulous by the viceroy Nien-Hy-Iao, say, that mankind then lived like brutes, wandering through the forests; that the women were in common; that no other thought was entertained then, except for present subsistence; that animals were eat with skin, hair, and all, and birds with their feathers, and their blood served for drink; that raw hides were the only clothing; and in short, that Fo-Hi first taught them both hunting and fishing. Yet, nevertheless, it is maintained, that the Chinese could write before they knew how to make bread, and that the history of these bril­liant ages have been transmitted to us by the literati of those remote and savage times.

What, however, renders the Chinese most con­temptible is, the prevalence of superstition amongst them, which usurps the place of religion in every breast. The memory of the reign of Tching-Tsong, the third emperor of the nineteenth dynasty, has in particular been stigmatized by the [Page 149] favour shewn under his government to every species of bigotry, and the encouragement of re­ligious juggling, and though, as we have before mentioned, they are in general atheists they are not the only people amongst whom superstition is found coupled with atheism.

Evil spirits are in their opinion agents in the most common occurrences. They have a kind of ballot or lottery, by which they discover whether they may begin a journey, whether they may buy or sell, whether they may marry their children fortunately or unfortunately; they take the greatest pains to find out by their arts of divination the most advanta­geous spot on which to erect a house, the quarter towards which they must make the opening of the door; the day most propitious for the building of a kiln; which hill or eminence to chuse for the most comfortable burying-place; and this last point is of such great consequence, that when a man excels in wit or learning, the merit is not his own, a sudden elevation to any honour or dignity is not attributed to desert or success in trade, to industry or penetra­tion, but all is ascribed to the proper choice of a place of burial for his forefathers.

The power of impostors over weak minds is no where so great as in China; no where are fortune-tellers [Page 150] and astrologers held in such estimation as there; the markets and streets swarm with people of this description, who make open profession of their business, and hang out a sign like other trades­men; nothing is ever done in China without first consulting these conjurers, whose lying prognostica­tions are imprinted with the stamp of eternal truth in the eyes of their admirers. A Chinese, who may have been persuaded by one of these magicians, that he is unable to beget children, will every time his wife is pregnant of a child, of his own procreation, think her an adulteress; he will rather embitter the life of an honest woman, and fill his head with the most tormenting ideas of imaginary cuckoldom, than avoid by kindness the giving occasion to his wife to serve him in reality the trick he has been made to suspect.

The almanac which is published every year, under the inspection and with the approbation of the emperor, and of the court of mathematicians, contains, besides a few astronomical calculations, a specification of what days and hours are lucky or unlucky; the days on which phlebotomy is advise­able, the minute most auspicious to beg any favour of the emperor, the hours when to pay honours to the deceased, when to make offerings, when to mar­ry, when to build, when to invite friends, and in [Page 151] general, when to attend to almost every public and private occupation; this almanac is in the hands of every body▪ and is the summary of all the knowledge of many families, and an oracle for all China.

In addition to these egregious faults, and to this deplorable ignorance, the [...]e [...] no nation on earth more addicted to pride and arrogance than the Chinese. In their opinion, they excel all mankind in ability and knowledge, which they possess in as great a degree as human nature is capable of; and, prepossessed in the extreme in favour of their man­ners and principles, they cannot conceive that any thing they do not practise can be right, nor any thing their learned men are ignorant of, can be true.

And thus the most defective knowledge is a source of pride, to a nation which perceives nothing want­ing in itself, nor any thing good in others; which thinks itself only enlightened and wise, and all others both blind and stupid.

Chapter X. Reflections on the Benefits and Evils of National Pride founded upon imaginary Advantages.

ROUND Cape Horn, and so through Terra Australis Incognita to the Devil, is the journey eve­ry philosopher wishes to the prejudices of all other men, while he remains firmly attached to his own; yet prejudices must, and ought so far to exist among mankind as they are useful.

There is certainly a degree of national pride arising only from prejudice, that is of great politi­cal utility. Self-conceit is productive of hope and fear in a nation; the latter preserves men from the commission of crimes, the former invites them to the care of self-interest and to diligence. From self-conceit proceeds likewise vanity, and from this last, the desire of rising above one's station; the love of ostentation, emulation, arts, fashions, good manners, and taste; vanity and pride are therefore in the hands of sound policy very useful follies, for they are born with us, die with us, never tire, and have often the appearance of virtues.

[Page 154]The love of our country is little more, in many cases, than the love of an ass for his manger. But the intelligent and accomplished Lady Mary Wortley Montague, after a long course of travels through Asia, Africa, and the greatest part of Europe, was firmly of opinion that an honest English country gentleman was the happiest of men; for he does not trouble his head to know, nor indeed would he believe, that Greek wine is better than stout ale; he is convinced that the richest fruits of Africa have neither the fine yellow tints nor the fine fla­vour of his golden pippin; that Italian becafico are nothing like so nice as a piece of roast beef; in short, that there can be no perfect enjoyment out of Old England.

We always must contemplate with pleasure a nation which loves itself, exalts its own country­men, prefers its own manufactures to those of foreigners, esteems its own writers, and by having the highest opinion of itself, and all that belongs to it, is as happy as possible, either in imagination or reality, for both are the same. Let, therefore, our philosophy call the prejudices which arise from education ever so destructive and mistaken, which make a Moor believe his country the finest in the world, and that God himself was at the trouble of creating Ethiopia, while the other parts of the globe were made by his deputed angels; [Page 155] or those which induce a Laplander to seek for an earthly paradise among his Norwegian and pri­maeval snows, or a Swiss, as the penetrating Doctor Smollet says in his travels, to prefer the barren mountains of Soleure to the fertile plains of Lombardy; suffer others to behold their own country with partiality; suffer them, like the peasants round Saint Marino, to believe that they are the only good and honest men on earth; suffer them to take the little circle that forms their horizon for the rule of all possible exten­sion, and let their governors be wisely anxious to give the greatest importance and extent to the trifling interests of the small tract, beyond which they think there is nothing worthy of a thought, at least, let the space be ever so un­bounded on the other side of the hedge, they care not about it, but think there is a Deity who will at­tend to the whole; for content makes happy fathers, happy citizens, and happy subjects, with no better fare than black bread, hard cheese, and butter-milk.

This is all I can say in favour of that species of national pride, founded on imaginary advantages. It would be a good excuse for this pride, and an alle­viation of the ill it causes, in consequence of its at­tendant contempt, if it could with any justice be said that contempt lessens hatred as much as it does [Page 156] envy, which is the painful and corroding sorrow pervading the mind on the perception of another's happiness or good fortune. Whoever envies a rich man for his wealth, finds his envy lessened, when he plainly perceived that this Croesus is a fool; who­ever envies a man of learning for his science, is sure to find his envy diminish, if he can persuade himself, that his worldly knowledge rises infinitely superior to that of this man of letters. But hatred consists in wishing for the calamity of another: an enemy, for instance, is a subject of hatred in proportion as he awakens our fears; he may be inexpressibly contemptible, but his power may be great; and we shall never cease hating him till his power can have no influence ei­ther on our happiness or misery.

The mutual hatred of nations for each other, however in nowise decreases by their mutual con­tempt; the Greeks were full as much animated by both passions against the Persians; the populace among Christians look on the Jews, without ex­ception, as dead to every sentiment of virtue and benevolence, and deeply sunk in the most con­temptible covetousness, usury, and villainy. It is, therefore, almost an article of religion, and a meri­torious work, to persecute the Jews on account of the abhorrence which is felt for them; and to hate them because they are contemned and despised. Con­tempt [Page 157] and hatred for another nation, are no where united with more force and expression than in the English against the French. A foreigner, if not dressed like an Englishman, is in great danger of being assailed with dirt for being thought a French­man; but in a thousand instances the French re­turn this contempt. We may form, without ex­ception, very just conclusions of their other opinions respecting the English, from the French accounts of the warlike actions of their valiant neighbours; of which the Jumonville of M. Thomas is a remark­able instance. This is an heroic poem, in which the national hate and lust of revenge has inspired the author, one of the greatest geniuses and most up­right men of France, to take occasion, from the firing of three or four guns from a small fort, and the death of about eight Frenchmen, to set up a lamentation as if it was a St. Bartholomew's massacre. The French hate the Spaniards in the same manner, because they despise them. In the campaign in Italy of 1746, the greatest exasperation broke out on numberless occasions between those nations, who were then al­lies, to the great detriment of the operations of war. At Hospitella, in the middle of the day, a Spanish regiment of cavalry attacked one of the French regi­ments, because they could not agree about their encampment, which was separated from one ano­ther by a high road.

[Page 158]But the hate of a nation for foreigners is very often to its extreme detriment universal. In Eng­land, they acknowledge that the unnatural antipa­thy of the English for all foreigners, is one of the greatest and most illiberal causes which prevents the settlement and population of the immense posses­sions of this nation in America, by the want where­of the growth of trade and prosperity is greatly impeded.

Much worse consequences flow from the con­tempt which arises from religious pride. Whoever imagines that no man can be truly estimable or virtuous, whose belief does not precisely agree with his own, whoever condemns and renounces those who do not think exactly as he does on every point of theology, becomes of course an enemy to the greatest part of mankind. The unavoidable conse­quence of a prepossession of the infallibility of one's church is intolleration; and this again produces a swarm of venomous prejudices and opinions, which, like the musquitos in hot countries, are continually pestering us by myriads on all sides, and cannot fail of stinging those who are not armed with the fly-flap of reason, or the imperforable veil of phi­losophy.

As long as the hope and expectation is enter­tained that the whole world will finally adhere [Page 159] to one confession of faith, the furtherance of the grand work of conversion is supposed to be the in­dispensable and bounden duty of every individual: those who are thought to wander in darkness and error, are therefore not easily suffered to live in peace and quiet. The man, who imagines he is sur­rounded by men doomed to eternal damnation, is there­fore a saint, and ever ready to fight the devil in his own domain; and the Gospel of the God of Peace and Love has therefore been continuully debased and contaminated by persecuting and blood-thirsty priests with their appropriate instruments, swords and bay­onets, gibbets, stakes, racks, wheels, and chains^*.

These opinions have at all times inflamed the minds of men; zealous churchmen have ever been the first promoters of heresies, and have augmented the number of heretics, exactly in proportion to the blindness of their zeal and their industry in dis­covering them. Let us take a retrospect of the time of the crusades; these cost Europe two millions of fighting men, monks and priests, with the mass-book in one hand and the bloody banner of war in the other, led the van; numerous armies of holy robbers followed them, decorated and consecrated to the service of the Lord by a white cross; they quitted their lawful occupations and respectable si­tuations in the West, to become thieves and mur­derers [Page 160] in the East; they sold their possessions i [...] order to go forth, under the blessing of the Lamb o [...] God, to plunder those of the infidels; they abandoned their wives, to deflower virgins and violate matrons, in honour of the Almighty; and, in th [...] result, they sacrificed every consideration for th [...] benefit of being cut to pieces, in a distant, but a [...] holy region, and sent to their long home, pollute [...] with the blood of the innocent, and loaded with the execrations of the inoffensive inhabitants of the country they had made the scene of devastation and bloodshed: and yet their religion, the cause for which they fought, was directly opposite to the tenets of the Alkoran, against which these san­guinary and ruinous expeditions were set on foot. The commands of their God were founded on peace, on meekness, and on charity; those which Maho­met imposed on his followers as the will of the Omnipotent, taught that the sacrifice of themselves and their property in war, for the conquest and constraint of infidels, and the establishment and en­largement of the true religion, was the greatest merit; that those who die in battle for the sake of their faith, live hereafter in immortal happiness; that the blood shed in the cause of religion, if but a single drop, is pleasing to the Deity; and that to watch one night for the defence of the frontiers of the faithful, is more agreeable to Heaven than a ri­gid fast of two months.

[Page 161]The haughtiness of religious pride will not ad­mit of any toleration; it irritates the minds of men by always attempting to force them to think as we do; and this ambition of domineering over the con­sciences of mankind is the true source of religious zeal. It has been observed, that, in common dis­putes, perverseness and obstinacy never reach that height which they do in the most trifling religious controversies, for in other things almost every one is aware that he may be deceived; but, on the con­trary, we are always intimately persuaded of the truth of our system of faith, and are therefore very angry at those of another persuasion, who, instead of conforming to our opinions, are intent upon con­straining us to alter them in compliance with their own. The pride of religion, and the spirit of per­secution accompanying it, likewise produces, among the professors of the same belief, that cruel and sus­picious spirit of dogmatism, that inquisitorial aus­terity which would preclude all necessity of thought, and require the most implicit conformity, in what­ever regards their system of theology, and which would banish truth and knowledge, together with the liberty of disquisition from even our Protestant religion, if the bitterness of our zealous controver­sial writers was not sometimes curbed and kept un­der by a biting and severe sarcasm on their untimely and unqualified asperity.

[Page 162]Religious pride would have its own creed give the law to the belief of all men. It ascribes to the Supreme Being its own ravings and unreasonable opinion, and makes the maintenance of its theory appertain to the honour of the Godhead. If its principles or its voice fail, arrogance, envy, ran­cour, and an universal hatred for mankind, put on the mask of religion, and execute in the name of the Lord the most diabolical revenge: hence came the presumption, the warmth and violence which were manifest in the sectaries of the Greek church, who thought themselves polluted by speaking to one of another communion, or by only abiding under the same roof; hence came the opinion among the sub­jects of the Byzantian emperors, that those princes who, in their eyes, were rebellious to their God, could not have been appointed their rulers by Pro­vidence, and were therefore not the anointed of the Lord; hence came the tyrannic sway and inflexible cruelty which so many servants of the God of Peace have extolled and enjoined in the worldly judges, whose aid they have called in to terminate their religious differences; and hence, even very re­cently, principles the most inimical to mankind have shone forth, with the full splendour of stu­pidity, which characterized the fifteenth and six­teenth centuries, in the Pastoral Letters of the Apostle of Cracow.

[Page 163]Ever since the mild and invisible kingdom of another world has been changed into the most vio­lent, as well as tangible and apparent despotism in this, Christianity, violated by the hands of its priests, has made men hard, austere, unmerciful, and out­rageous; it has put fire and sword into their hands; it has led kings and princes to make a hell of this world, to murder and torture, in the name of the God of Mercy, the subjects they were bound to cherish and protect. But our Redeemer has not taught us a selfish and tyrannical doctrine; he has not taught us to be sanguinary and oppressive, nor to believe what the worthy fathers of the church, the beloved jesuits, those Janissaries of the Holy See, as Pope Benedict the Fourteenth emphatically called them, would have us believe, namely, that as often as they vociferate this maxim, that no heretic should be spared, the sound ascends to the throne of God, and is a pleasing oblation in his ear. It was not from the love of the religion of Jesus that the Spaniards subjugated America, although under this pretext they depopulated a space of country as large as Europe, and put twelve or fifteen millions of the inhabitants to death, whose only crime was the being in possession of gold and silver, which the Spani­ards coveted, and which they even offered to share with them; and although, with the most inconceiv­able gravity, the Spaniards entered into an engage­ment at Hispaniola to hang daily in cold blood, in [Page 164] honour of our Lord and his twelve Apostles, thir­teen of the charitable Indians who brought them their daily food.

Religious pride is the cause of that theological rage with which Christians of all sects zealously labour for the good of their church, defend its doc­trines with clamour and scurrility, and burst out in triumph when erroneous or opposite opinions have been ably combated, or the embracers of them converted; and when they have given these notorious proofs of their attachment to their per­suasion, they think themselves real and zealous Christians. But a great genius of our days, Dr. Resewitz, professor at Copenhagen, pertinently asks, whether they shew as much earnestness against the sins the gospel has prohibited to us, as they do in combating theological errors? Whether it is not often manifest that on other occasions, when disputation is out of the question, they are indif­ferent to the most material points of Christianity? Whether they do not quietly behold, or rather studiously and designedly close their eyes, when they are witnesses of very great iniquity, and when the doctrine of Christ is more disgraced by the manners of its followers, than by any speculative errors that can arise? Whether they do not follow the mandates of their own wicked lusts with the same warmth with [...]hich they are [Page 165] animated in the pursuit and persecution of mis­taken opinions?

In consequence of the prevalence of anathe­mas in Italy, whoever is guilty of an infraction of the laws of the church in the merest trifles, is reconed a far greater delinquent than the man who has committed the most flagrant violations of the laws of nature and morality. A murderer, an adulterer, will more easily gain his pardon of the church, and will more readily be readmitted into society, than he who has sacrilegiously dared to eat a bit of pigeon on a Saturday without an ex­press indulgence: the former is handled as gently and cautiously as a nun does her conscience, when the sins of incontinency rise up against her; but the latter is a monster, a man whose conversation must be avoided, for he is nearly esteemed an heretic; and of all the sins of the Italian confession, heresy is the most abhorred and damnable.

The contempt and hatred which prevails so much between the opposite persuasions of the Christian religion, are also wholly consequences of the pre­judices occasioned by a bad education▪ the Chris­tian youth are taught to condemn, what in their riper years they feel inclined to excuse; the poison­ous seeds of hatred, discord, and abhorrence are sown in their tender bosoms; and they learn at [Page 166] school to detest as idolaters, or execrate as heretics, those who, at the age of reason, they are tempted to embrace as brethren and fellow Christians. The more we attain to a sound understanding of the real scope of the Christian religion, the more we must feel the great absurdity and narrowness of the prepossessions entertained by weak-minded Pro­testants against the members of the Roman church, or those, on the other hand, which foolish Catholics cherish against the Protestants. The common peo­ple among us are wont to be mightily astonished, when they hear of any generous deed of a Catholic towards a Protestant, or that the greatest esteem and friendship, together with the sincerest urbanity can exist between men of different religions. The inhabitanss of Toulouse believed that it was an established law among the reformed, that such of them as abandoned their persuasion to embrace the Roman Catholic religion were to be strangled; and, prepossesed with this idea, the parliament of Tou­louse ordered the old and innocent Calas to be broke on a wheel, because he was a Huguenot, and his son in a fit of melancholy hung him­self without ever thinking of a change of religion. We must, unfortunately, when our reason is come to maturity, be very retentive of prejudices learned often by rote, and adopted without consideration in our youth, if we do not see that it is possible to be true to our religion, without at the same time [Page 167] being surprised that others can likewise be true to theirs; that there is nothing so rational and con­ciliatory as a perfect liberty of opinion; that, in a world where error and not truth is the portion of the greatest part of its inhabitants, God will judge our hearts, and not our understandings; that we are all children of one common father, and co-heirs of all his promises, if we believe only as much as we can, and live according to his commandments; and that virtue and piety, whether seen counting of beads and repeating the Ave Maria, or sitting down with a protestant to a dinner of flesh-meat in lent, are always equally lovely and amiable^*.

Let us now cast a few glances at other national follies. Men might often enjoy greater freedom were it not their own fault, but they fetter them­selves, and still boasting of their liberty, are truly ridiculous. The constitution of a country or a city may be free, and remain so, and yet the minds of its inhabitants be in chains. Whoever in a repub­lic acts solely on his own behalf, and speaks his mind freely only where he sees it can in no degree hurt either himself or his family, is very often against his will and his conscience, and contrary to his oath and duty, an abject slave. The patriot in­habitants of a republican city ought therefore not to glory too much in their liberty, when the majority of [Page 168] them are ready, like so many wild cats, to fly in the face of a stranger, who should venture to affirm in public, that it is possible for a burgomaster's son to err in matters of literature.

The haughty presumption of sole or pre-eminent courage, power, and consideration, is the cause of the very astonishing perverseness of opinion preva­lent in a nation with regard to all others, and an inexhaustible fountain of patriotic falsehoods for their historians. Few writers of history guard them­selves sufficiently against conceit and partiality, shewing us the noble deeds of our countrymen, and the advantages gained by our own nation, through a magnifying glass, and those which may have been obtained over us by others through a very contrary medium.

The pride which proceeds from an ignorance of foreign affairs, deprives a nation of many advan­tages which flow from an acquaintance with the in­ventions and knowledge of other nations. Arm­ed with impenetrable prejudices against every use­ful innovation, it fixes its regard solely and listless­ly on the soil it treads on, and thereby remains for ever enthralled by political superstition, which cleaves to the barren pride of ancestral worth, and condemns whatever is without precedent, however good in itself.

[Page 169]The pride that is founded upon ignorance, is the surest way to confirm our ignorance. When­ever we believe that we know all that is useful, there can be nothing else worth knowing; the arts, and sciences always will remain in statu quo in every nation which fancies it is as far advanced in them as possible. This foolish perverseness is a great hin­derance to the extension of knowledge in many countries, which are otherwise very capable of im­provement. The French defended and maintained the opinions of Descartes, long after his vortices, his elements, his theory of light, his romance of the formation of mankind, and all his other theoretic dreams were confuted. Their national pride kept them blind to the power of attraction and the divi­sion of the sun-beams, as well as to the circulation of the blood, and the utility of inoculation, for an equal length of time; and they certainly would not have attempted the defence of the system of Des­cartes after it had been exploded, if they were not addicted to the bad custom of exalting every thing that is French, above all the inventions and disco­veries made elsewhere.

But we are at present upon the eve of a great revolution, at the period of a second demarcation between light and darkness. We may observe in Europe a second general insurrection in favour of good sense and sound judgment; the clouds of [Page 170] ignorance and fear are dispelling; weary of our long continued slavery, we are loosening the chains of ancient prejudices, in order to resume the possession of our lost rights of common sense and freedom. The lights which are so generally spread abroad, the spirit of philosophical inquiry which so univer­sally prevails, the great discoveries it has made of the defects and errors of hitherto generally received opinions, and in short, the storming of seem­ingly impregnable fortresses of prejudice and igno­rance which have to this time kept us in subjection; all manifest a strength of thought, a hardiness of intellect, which, though it often may shoot out into a reprehensible audacity, and will take from many the little share of liberty they possess, and the whole temporal welfare of more, as well as now and then a head or two, though it often will give occasion for sophistry and fallacious subtilty to become the logic of the day; yet joined to manly policy, and a due deference to the laws, promises to make our age that of the greatest improvements, and to give the mortal stroke to barbarism and superstition. The useful part of knowledge is no more made a secret in the hands of a few pedants; the thinking part of every nation communicate their ideas to the public in the vernacular tongue, and the most ab­stracted truths are now rendered comprehensible, and brought home to the meanest capacities. All the great interests of mankind are considered and [Page 171] animadverted upon in writings of sense and feeling, which touch the heart and enlighten the under­standing; every thing is narrowly inspected and accurately defined; all is business and activity, and all seems to announce a general reformation in the practical as well as the theoretical part of life: this advances in some places with slow and unsuspected steps, in others it emerges at once, like the sun from behind a cloud, and dissipates every obstruct­ing mist. Even in Vienna, and in all the Roman Catholic States of Germany, we see the spirit of phi­losophy boldly venturing forth; we see it surmount the strongest barriers of idleness and stupidity, and rising victorious in places where the throne of superstition was encompassed by the most hideous clouds of darkness, prejudice, and ignorance. Some years ago, a man of learning came from a foreign country to Switzerland, intending to settle in a land of liberty of opinion; he resided ten days at Zurich, and then left us to go even to Portugal.

Awake and read, is the best aphorism for the cure of prepossession against nations whom we do not sufficiently know; the more we converse or correspond with one another, the less will be our reciprocal contempt. Knowledge produces be­tween nations who have the most rooted aversion for each other, a spirit of amity and love; lessens the mutual national hatred, which cramps the soul; [Page 172] destroys the barriers of self-interest and jealousy, and, together with an extension of intellect, and a more manly elevation of mind, gives a greater de­gree of moderation and equity to our judgment of other nations. The learned are all members of the republic of letters, in which, notwithstanding the great inequality which is found in it, no tyrant is allowed nor any oligarchy permitted.

About forty years ago, a stranger, who might have had the impudence to let slip any mention of an English tragedy or comedy in good company at Paris, would have been hissed and hooted at. But now the most sensible Frenchmen allow, that to these bold Islanders we owe the present reigning and judicious system of morality and policy; that they first laboured for the advantage of the many and the interest of the nation; while in France nothing was thought of but wit and frivolity^*: in a word, that the English possess as much genius, more energy, and only a little less taste than them­selves.

Good English translations of some German writ­ings would at once remove the greatest part of that contempt which the English writers entertain for [Page 173] the Germans. The time will come, when France will not reproach the Swiss, that a poet among them is as rare an animal and as great a wonder as an Elephant at Paris. It is not unlikely that in Eng­land, even now, a Swiss may be supposed to be endowed with the capacity of thinking; but the opinion of our intellectual abilities is generally formed from those ages of devotion and strict at­tention to propriety, when the first public stews were established at Berne; and when at the same time the caterpillars, which in 1479 had committed great ravages in our Canton, were by the patriotic council of the Apostolical Doctor and city Re­corder of Bern, Thuring Frikart, summoned by a formal notification to appear before the spiritual Court of the Bishop of Lausanne, who in conjunc­tion with his ecclesiastical Counsellors, after a due attention and accurate investigation of the complaint and defence, the reply and rejoinder, anathematized these catterpillars in the name of the holy Trinity.

Even in Spain, formerly and yet the seat of credulity and superstition, a beginning has been made to command respect, by a sound discussion of the most critical points of belief. Father Isla, a Spanish Jesuite, wrote a few years ago a novel under the title of the History of the highly famous preacher Gerundio of Campazas, surnamed Sotos (i. e. Dun­derhead). The reverend brother Gerundio ap­pears [Page 174] as an epitome of all the etxravagancies, follies, and holy absurdities, so usual in the Spanish pulpits. It met with the greatest success; for the whole edi­tion of the first volume was sold at Madrid in the space of four and twenty hours, and the author afterwards fell into great penury, which is a sure proof that the nation thought well of his work.

The more sensible part of mankind seems from time to time to adhere less to those opinions which keep them asunder, than to those which draw them together. The toleration of opposite religions, be­comes daily more advisable and more practised by princes; and the more money is spent at court, the greater complacency is used towards all im­provements in philosophy and humanity; since they all serve to increase the income of the chamber­lain^*. The laws in England are so mild with respect to catholics, that they are suffered to have their chapels, their schools, and their priests, together with the liberty of making proselytes, and likewise much influence in the parliamentary elections. The Elector of Mentz founded a short time ago a theo­logical college of the Augsburgh confession in Erfurt. In Rome, strangers of all religions have for a long time been tolerated; for the sake of the [Page 175] money they spend, without being at all disturbed on account of their faith, or being ever required to join in any act of devotion of the Romish Church. The people, who in this respect think exactly as his Holiness, only say with a smile, these folks are so unfortunate as not to believe in God. In Nice, even where the believing populace is the most ignorant and stupid of any in the Catholic coun­tries, it is a fact, that the most scrupulous Pied­montese farmer pays dearer for the dung which he gets from the house of a protestant, where flesh is eaten every day, than for that of an honest ca­tholic, who must put up with meagre diet one half of the year; and as to the manure yielded by the Reverend Fathers, the Minims, for that he will not give a farthing. Controversy is, in our times, quite an uncultivated field, since there now are protestants who have directly maintained, that all the most acute systems of polemical divinity are nothing but a collection of reveries, and catholics who can forgive a protestant, if otherwise an honest man, who does not hold as a geometrical truth that Saint Michael reads mass every Monday in Heaven.

Over-weening national prejudices have likewise partly subsided, since nations have insisted less upon false points of honour. A very laugh­able circumstance in the history of my own country will illustrate this truth to the reader, [Page 176] if he compares the notion of honour then enter­tained by the Swiss with that we now hold. In the year 1458, the Confederates were invited by the city of Constance to a shooting party; but unfortunately, near the conclusion of the diver­sion, a Lucerner and a burgher of Constance, being about to shoot for a wager, the Lucerner staked a small piece of money coined in Bern, which is called a Plappert; this the other in derision called a Kuh­plappert (that is, a piece of cow dung). This was taken so ill, that the Canton of Lucern immediately urged the whole Confederacy to join them in resent­ing the injury. The forces of the state affronted, the honour-loving Lucern, aided by those of Under­wald, opened the campaign by the invasion of Thurgaw. They seized on Weinfeld, because the proprietor of that place was a near relation of the aggressor, and laid a contribution on the inhabit­ants of two thousand florins. The other Con­federates prepared likewise for war; the forces of the Canton of Bern were already on foot, and arms were not laid down till the city of Con­stance restored their pitiful honour to the Swiss by a penitentiary gift of three thousand Rhenish florins.

In our more enlightened days, nations will not so lightly attack each other from such mistaken notions of honour; at least, as long as interest is [Page 177] the band that holds them together. Yet Newton will often be called an almanac-maker, and Mon­tesquieu a blockhead, while the French and English struggle with all their power for the mastery of the American trade.

The most inordinate pride must always ac­company the most profound ignorance; for none but an empty Parisian would suppose that his fellow citizens were the only thinking beings on earth; and none but a Spanish Eulogist of Saint Roche, would exclaim from the pulpit, in a complaining tone, "How could gracious Heaven permit so exemplary, so great a Saint, to be born a French­man!"

Chapter XI. Of Pride, grounded on Real Advantages.

THIS pride consists in a consciousness of the excellencies we in reality possess, and a due estima­tion of them in consequence.

I need not make use of ingenious arguments to prove, that the pride we are about to treat of is essentially different from presumption or arrogance. It is true, both individuals and nations may in one respect be proud, and in another presumptuous or vain; yet, pride is frequently seen unaccompanied by presumption or vanity, and these again, often exist independent and unconnected with pride. In the latter case, it is from ideal advantages that ar­rogance is formed, and such real advantages as might rationally be expected to produce pride, are contemned and despised; whereas, in the former, a value is only placed on what is really valuable. Arrogance is vain of little advantages; pride, of great ones. Arrogance strives for the pre-eminence every where and in every thing; pride [Page 180] leaves fools to enjoy their own rank. Arrogance makes a man endeavour to be remarkable by his table, clothes, equipage, liveries, &c. pride makes him trust solely to his own desert. Arrogance acts by mistaken notions of the point of honour; pride by the principles of genuine honour. Arrogance is fond of shewing its lordliness to inferiors; pride prefers to justle with superiors. Arrogance is of­fensive on account of its folly; pride, on account of its understanding and virtue. Arrogance can descend to every baseness; pride does not easily stoop to be mean. Arrogance often begets os­tentation; pride, by a little turn of the scale, be­comes vanity. Arrogance is in every shape folly; pride becomes folly when it gives way to self-con­ceit, when it courts esteem and honours, when it exacts as a tribute from the world that praise which must be a voluntary gift, or when it seeks for re­compence immediately around itself, requiring it from every one near, and is impatient and peevish at the least delay.

In the pulpit, pride is declaimed against and rejected without exception, often indeed with­out reason, and consequently without effect; although, on the other hand, two of the best preachers, Spalding and Sterne, have inveighed against it with the most impressive energy. But my object, as may easily be seen is not to depict [Page 181] men as they should be, but as they are; and my chief aim is to exhibit the different ramifications of pride as they appear in man; to examine his nature in order to develope its causes, to par­ticularize and arrange the several appearances of pride as they occur; and to explain their respective effects. From this investigation it plainly ap­pears, that there are two sorts of pride, and many subdivisions belonging to each sort; that therefore the moral philosopher must take care not to confound these two species as in general is done; and that the language which cannot express the consciousness of real worth, in contradistinction to the conceit of ideal advantages, or self-esteem op­posed to self-conceit, must be barren indeed.

This consciousness is essentially inherent in the nature of man, although it never has fair play; since self-love ever prevents us from estimating our own advantages by the rule of equity.

In the minds of individuals, it is the sense of in­ward worth that Pythagoras held to be the greatest incentive to virtue; a centinel which the author of nature has placed within us, to keep aloof all that is little, mean, and unworthy the greatness of our soul; and, what requires to be particularly attended to, it is a perpetual exhorter to root out our defects. No base, malignant, or criminal thoughts will arise in [Page 182] us, if we entertain an esteem for ourselves, if we submit all the inclinations of our soul to the tri­bunal of our judgment, and if we more fear our own condemnation than that of others. The sense of the beauty and dignity of human nature, to which all moral virtue finally tends, seems not able to subsist without this respect for ourselves. Im­pressed with this sense of his own worth, a man cannot avoid esteeming and valuing himself, but only inasmuch as he makes a part of the com­munity or nation over whom this noble sentiment extends. The esteem for one's self is a curb to all crimes; a libertine clergyman is addressed, "Re­member your ecclesiastical dignity;" a magistrate, who judges of the propriety of a complaint in pro­portion to the greatness of the sum of money which accompanies it, is reminded, "That he sits in the seat of justice." In the last war, when batteries upon batteries, when two, three, and four successive en­trenchments were to be forced, the cry was general throughout the ranks of the assailants, "Remember ye are Prussians;" in like manner, the vicious should be called on, "Remember the high destina­tion of man."

The consciousness of the real worth of one's nation, is the same with national pride founded on real advantages; and this pride is a political virtue of no small importance. The sense of the [Page 183] worth of our ancestors, is a spur to emulation. Partaking in the fame of our nation for arts and sciences, we are awakened to the desire of encreasing it. The conviction that we live under a good govern­ment, endears our country to us and secures our fidelity. The just pride of a nation, therefore, arises chiefly from its domestic advantages, but not always from the estimation these are held in by other nations. This esteem is sought after by vain nations; and is but little valued by those who are free; the English are not vain, for they do not care what others think of them; when honour is their motive of action, they do not take this mo­tive from the judgment of others; it suffices if they are estimable in their own eyes, or at most in those of their countrymen. Yet vanity is so far con­nected with this kind of pride, inasmuch as we believe our national fame exalts us individually in the eyes of foreigners.

The pride, therefore, that arises from real ad­vantages, if kept within proper bounds, may be the germ of the greatest elevation of mind. A man, who is wholly diffident of himself, or who by a due self-esteem does not possess a noble confidence in his own strength, is unable to resist common occurrences, and therefore incapable of any great action; he who has not the capacity of appreci­ating his own qualities, will seldom become an [Page 184] object of general esteem. It is only the man who is conscious how far and wherefore he is estimable, and who never looses sight of the calm benevolence towards others which proceeds from modest worth, that can have a high sense of the dignity of human nature. The best founded pride is debased to the dust if it endeavours to make contemptible what is not so: the best founded self-esteem is insufferable when it denies to others their due measure of respect. Envy, too, can never accompany a proper and noble pride, although it in nowise proceeds from contempt; and, notwithstanding it assiduously endeavours to fix contempt on its object, for it only betrays a fear of being surpassed. A noble mind always feels gratified by the consideration of the worth of others, which gives it a better sense of its own greatness, in proportion as that of others is more perceptible. Real merit is always disposed to emulation, never to envy or jealousy. None but men of very moderate understanding will turn away with disgust, from the contemplation of any thing that bears the stamp of perfection. A man of sense never despises an idiot, for he knows but too well how often he is like him; yet he despises the fool who endeavours to be of consequence, and boasts when he is an idiot. The virtuous man hates vice, but does not hate the vicious whom he despises. Modesty is the most attractive em­bellishment of female beauty; but a woman of [Page 185] exalted sentiments, who possesses the noble pride of conscious worth, which esteems itself, and has a just claim to be esteemed by others, will despise a heart that is insensible to her real value, and which loves her more for her personal charms than for her mental excellencies.

But I am now led to the contemplation of the noble self-esteem, which whole nations are possessed of; a prospect of greater extent, and requiring a more elevated tone, than the consideration of indi­vidual pride, already treated of.

Chapter XII. Of Pride which is produced in a Nation by the Remembrance of the Heroism and Valour of its Ancestors.

GLOWING representations and animated de­scriptions of the noble exploits and dangerous enter­prizes which have been atchieved by great men for their country's dearest rights, inspire the most dis­tant generations with a generous pride of ancestral worth, and secure the lasting duration of that hero­ism which had become hereditary, giving magnani­mity even to the effeminate.

The remembrance of the valour which encircled the brows of our ancestors with never fading laurels, is a perpetual memorial and an unceasing incite­ment to us, that we should do nothing unworthy of their name; that we should esteem ourselves able to maintain it in all its pristine lustre. If we would imitate the virtues of our progenitors, if we would approach near to their renown, if we would revive their great and glorious days, we must be mindful of our origin, and of the duties it imposes on us; [Page 188] we must keep our ancestors in view, as our bright examples; their deeds of hardihood and virtue must be the favourite subjects of our sculptor's and our painter's art, an animating fire enlivening the ready eloquence of our orators, and the sublime imaginations of our poets: we must never look on their renown as an inheritance, which we may en­joy in indolence; never indulge in that impatient and jealous pride, which suggests that all must yield to a name of glory, and which is irritated at the preference present merit obtains over former worth. It is then that our fathers live again in their descendants; the spirits of the great and mighty slain beckon us to the battle; the moss-grown cenotaphs and ancient trophies seem to rise before us; the guardian Genii of our nation are seen supporting in the air the shades of the illustri­ous founders of our fame; and, enraptured by this pleasing vision, even the vanity and frivolity of vulgar minds yield to the thirst of glory: every heart and hand is united in the ardent pursuit of honour; and every soul blazes with true patriotism, and an undissembled admiration of our country's virtue.

The ancients emulously encouraged one another, by the remembrance of the heroic deeds of their ancestors,—to vigilance in peaceful times, and to intrepidity in the hour of danger. The noble senti­ments [Page 189] of the Corinthians, on this subject, are thus expressed by Thucidides: "Your fathers have ascended to fame through rugged, steep and un­trodden paths; let their examples be ever pres [...]ent to you: do not loose by wealth and indolence, what labour and poverty has attained." All were ex­horted not to remain inactively listening to the ancient stories, recounted by every nation of their former advantages, for these are only honourable to those who strive to emulate them, and act only as a foil to the disgrace of those who recede from ancestral worth, since it is more unpardonable to depart from the great examples we have before us, and ought to follow, than to remain insignificant and inactive, without any.

Every thing among the Greeks conduced to plant in their hearts the most heroic courage; by the remembrance of their ancestors, whose prin­ciples and sentiments were the spur to the noblest actions. By the view alone of the statues of Har­modius and Aristogiton, the detestation of tyranny was renewed in the hearts of the Athenians, and their gratitude to these courageous champions of their liberty was daily and hourly augmented. They instituted public funeral rites, in honour of those who died for their country: and a pile was erected three days before the completion of the ceremonies, on which the remains of the slain were [Page 190] publicly exposed to view: and the common wealth took charge of the maintenance and education of the children of those heroes, till they attained the age of puberty. The lowest Greeks were exalted to a level with their greatest chiefs by a glorious death; their memory was renewed by the most solemn offerings to the latest posterity, and their images were placed next to those of the Gods.

Animated with the sentiments these maxims in­spired, the Greeks advanced to their enemies. They encouraged one another with the recital of the deeds that had rendered their names famous, before the signal for battle was given, and invoked the departed spirits of their great forefathers to witness their actions on that day, when, proud of the glory they inherited, and worthy of the name they had gained, they resolved either to conquer or die. This noble resolution banished fear from their hearts, and conducted them with erect and cheerful countenances, to the very face of death, in search of honourable danger. The battle of Marathon alone was for many ages afterwards productive of the noblest emulation of equalling their ancestors. On every great occasion they called to mind this signal victory: "Remember the innumerable host of Persians; remember our own invincible little troop," was shouted on every side. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers [Page 191] was re-echoed from rank to rank. The nervous eloquence of Demosthenes engraved these senti­ments on the minds of the Athenians, excited their detestation of the artful king who attempted to undermine the state his arms could not subdue, inflamed every mind with the energetic love of liberty and his country, and stimulated every breast to great and heroic deeds. The Spartans took the field, animated by this spirit of unconquerable attachment to freedom and their country; their armies were small but victorious. Even the pre­sent descendants of the Spartans are the most courageous among the modern Greeks, and, under the despotic sway of the Turks, enjoy some remains of their pristine liberty. It was in order to renew in the Greeks the memory of their glorious ances­tors that Agesilaus, when he invaded Asia, em­barked at Aulis, the port whence the fleets and armies of united Greece took their departure, to revenge the rape of Helen: and when Alexander landed on that continent, to undertake its conquest, his first care was to awaken in his Greeks the re­membrance of their former victories over the Tro­jans. He repaired to Ilium, and visited the graves of Ajax, of Achilles, and of the other heroes who fell before the walls of Troy: he paid the cus­tomary honours to their manes; he celebrated with his attendants games and courses at the tomb of Achilles, sprinkled it with oil and crowned it with [Page 192] garlands. "Happy youth," he exclaimed at the monument of Achilles, "happy that in thy life thou wert blessed with a faithful friend, and a Ho­mer to immortalize thy valour." Such an avidity for glory, displayed with such masterly art, roused the noblest sentiments in every breast. Alexan­der sought to be like Achilles, his soldiers like Alex­ander: and this continual emulation warmed their imaginations, and raised their souls far above every terrestrial thought.

"Remember ye are Romans," was the com­mon exhortation of the generals of ancient Rome, to their companions in arms: this short harangue sufficed to rouse them to perseverance and inde­fatigable ardour in the most difficult enterprizes, and to intrepidity and firmness in the most bloody engagements. Filled with the memory of the va­lour of their ancestors, and impressed with an en­thusiastic persuasion of the future greatness of im­mortal Rome, as immutably decreed by the gods, and announced by ancient prophecies, they subju­gated nations, and conquered the world by the powerful influence of their conviction of the supe­rior privileges and advantages which were the birth-right of a Roman citizen.

The Arabians owe the liberty they still retain, to their courage: the Turks have not been able to [Page 193] subdue them, it is now many centuries; they are even daily extending their conquests. They have established themselves in many parts of Egypt, and neither pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte nor obey his commands; and it is the memory of their ancestors that feeds and nourishes this energy of soul. They hear, from their earliest youth, the deeds of their forefathers recited in their tents: Arabia resounds on every side with martial songs, comme­morating those feats of glory; and among its inha­bitants, the poet is equally renowned with the hero he celebrates. The poetic pictures of the valour and intrepidity which characterised the golden ages preceding that of Mahomet, are said to possess the same unadorned sublimity we so much admire in the best productions of the Grecian and Roman muse.

These seeds of heroism took still deeper root in the more stiff and rugged soil of northern regions. Those indigenous Scythian nations, who wandered from the banks of the Tanais to Scandinavia, in order to live in ease and comfort, who brought Sweden, Norway, Russia, and Denmark under the dominion of a Scythian family; who insensibly extended themselves through all Germany, and who successively overwhelmed with the horrors of war the flourishing provinces of Gaul, Spain, and, [Page 194] finally, the whole of the Empire of the West, upon which they poured down like the thickening clouds of a thunder-storm, impelled by the tempestuous blasts of their own northern winds: these, I say, had the same origin, the same laws, the same courage, the same love of liberty, the same attach­ment to the customs and religion of their forefa­thers, and the same contempt of death, founded up­on the hope of future and eternal happiness.

The customs and institutions of these nations were calculated to animate their sons, by reminding them of the prowess and hardihood of their ances­tors. These predominant qualities were held in the highest estimation among them, and the love of war was deeply rooted even in their religion. Their deified Odin, instead of a pure and abstracted no­tion of God, introduced an entirely sensual system; he knew how to adapt the Wolupso, which was to form the religious code of the Scythians, to the genius of the nation; his Heaven and his Hell were solely founded upon a scale of comparative valour; his laws far exceed those of Sparta, for the forcible injunction of the greatest contempt of death; the last gasp of their warriors on the field of battle was immediately connected with all those recompences which filled the whole of their imagi­nations, and suppressed the passion of fear, not by [Page 195] cool reasoning, or barren logic, but the irresist­ible impulse of other more violent and opposing passions.

Odin persuaded the Scandinavians that those who died like their fathers, with arms in their hands, would alone enjoy an happy immortality. To rush on the swords of the enemy, and immedi­ately to enter into the fruition of the promised re­wards, were, according to his doctrine, two occur­rences which were immediately consecutive. He per­suaded them, that their future felicity depended en­tirely on the shedding of their blood; and, in conse­quence, that a sick man must on his death-bed procure himself to be wounded, in order to appear bathed in his blood before his gods. Odin himself acted up to his doctrine. The faith that he had pro­pagated during a long and prosperous life, he con­firmed by a voluntary death. Apprehensive of the ignominious approach of disease and infirmity, he resolved to expire as became a warrior. In a solemn assembly of the Swedes and Goths, he wounded himself in nine mortal places, hastening away (as he asserted with his dying voice) to prepare the feast of heroes in the palace of the god of war. After his example, the Scandinavians sought the highest pitch of happiness and luxury in blood and death. "Our warriors," say their poets, "search out death with smiles, and embrace it [Page 196] with transport; they are seen in the battle, with their hearts transfixed, falling, laughing, and dy­ing." Lodbrog, a Northern chief, thus exults at the hour of his death: "What undescribable and hitherto unfelt emotions of joy arise in my soul! I die! I hear Odin's voice that calls me; I see the gates of his palace open, the lovely wantons, hav­ing their most bewitching charms half revealed to view, trip lightly forth, and beckon me to the ban­quet; their azure zones heighten the dazzling whiteness of their bosoms; they approach, and of­fer me the most delicious nectar, in skulls still moist with the blood of my enemies."

All other virtues were held inferior to that of courage by the Goths, who indeed despised every thing else—but most of all ostentation and magnifi­cence. Their women even learnt the use of arms. A princess, who chastised the temerity of a lover by slaying him with her own hand, was a subject of admiration. A young man could scarcely hope to succeed in his courtship, if he had not given public and unequivocal proofs of his courage. The son of a king dared not refuse the combat, which their religion sanctioned, if proffered even by the meanest peasant; since, conformably to their notions, vic­tory must declare itself in favour of the man who fought for a just cause.

[Page 197]These opinions, these deeds were transmitted to posterity by the first melodious warblings of the Scandinavian poets: these songs were recited to the boys, that their youthful hearts might early imbibe the knowledge of these heroic actions, which they would afterwards be called upon to emulate. They begat, in the souls of the auditors, those wonders I hope to see renewed by the im­mortal verses of the Tyrtaeus of Brandenburgh, and which I wish for, from the glowing numbers of his Swiss brother.

The ancient Germans caught the same spirit. Their youth sought honourable death, in the hope of being celebrated by their bards. The most valiant among them▪ upon his decease, was advan­vanced to the rank of a god; his children and pos­terity enjoyed the privileges of princes; they re­ceived gifts, and a large tract of land was assigned them: these privileges and this property was theirs as long as they were not unworthy of the glory of their progenitor. The beauteous daughters of the Franks^* bestowed their favours only on the brave warrior, and their judgment both of the merit and tenderness of his love was founded upon the proofs he had given of his valour; he must have taken prisoners, scaled some dangerous and well-defended [Page 198] precipice, driven the enemy from some strong entrenchment, ere he could hope to succeed with his mistress; for she would rather behold him a breathless corpse, than safely returned to her dis­graced by flight. Hence the harsh din of arms re­sounded throughout all Germany, and the banners of renown waved over every tomb. Even now, eve­ry patriot German treads, with inward emotions of reverence, the ground where the solemn remains of his illustrious ancestors repose in silence; and ap­proaches, with awe, the forest where their fame still hovers round the ancient oaks.

Could the nations of the North, educated in these opinions, avoid that noble esteem of them­selves, which their laws, their religion, and their bards so forcibly inspired? If they have not in­herited from their forefathers a fondness for softer and more civilized renown, yet they have inherited the noblest examples of manliness of soul, which have been deeply impressed on their ardently emu­lative minds.

The pride arising from the martial fame of their ancestors, has always been the greatest spur to courage and activity among the most valiant na­tions. The youthful warriors of the Huns were animated by a species of phrenzy, solely by listen­ing [Page 199] to the vocal melody, which revived and per­petuated the great atchievements of their ances­tors; a martial ardour flashed from their eyes; they became impatient for battle, and the tears of the old men expressed their generous despair, that they could no longer partake the dangers and glory of the field.

The Japanese were formerly a warlike nation, fond of military renown, and of attempting the most extended and hazardous enterprizes. Their most ancient families were distinguished by a noble and majestic countenance, and all despised death and danger. The pride arising from the glorious reputation of their ancestors was extended even to their children; their mode of education tended to imprint ideas of heroism and valour in their tender breasts; songs of war and victory were the first sounds that reached their ears. In their schools, they were exercised in transcribing the legends of their heroes, and the histories of their progeni­tors, who had voluntarily devoted themselves to a glorious death.

It was this same pride that in former ages im­pelled our Helvetians to trample upon the necks of their oppressors, after the longest struggles, and amid impending danger. A handful of rustics gained [Page 200] them liberty. The memory of those rustics glowed in the hearts of the brave Bernians at Laupen; their little band resolved not to die unworthy their Helvetian fame; they advanced to battle; crowned with vine leaves, they chaunted the noble deeds of the founders of their liberty, and dispersed their proudest foes like chaff before the wind. The memory of those rustics occasioned the defeat of the Austrian army at Sembach: their nume­rous and well appointed cavalry fled before the intrepidity of a few Helvetians; numbers and discipline were defeated by ardent impetuosity, and the most tremendous apparatus of war yield­ed to the attack of sickles and ploughshares, in the hands of the sons of freedom. The memory of those rustics filled the hearts of the twelve hun­dred brave Helvetians, who, not far from Basle, attacked forty thousand French, committed a great slaughter among them, and disputed the victory with unconquerable intrepidity, till the few remain­ing of their hardy troop were consumed to ashes among the ruins of a church, into which they had retreated and which was set on fire, they having refused to surrender. The memory of those rustics inflamed the souls of our fathers, who, at Murten, drove the Burgundians before them, as the light sand of the desert before the fierce Typhon and Ecnephia. The memory of those [Page 201] rustics, gained, by a thousand immortal actions, before their posterity was degenerated, the con­fidence of princes, the admiration of Europe, an established peace, and handed down to us for a lasting inheritance, only that Nostalgia^* which death alone can deprive us of.

The pride, therefore, that arises in a nation from the glorious reputation and known valour of their ancestors, is an abundant source of inflexible great­ness of soul, and the most certain preservative against the pernicious effects of pusillanimity.

Chapter XIII. Of Pride arising in a Nation from the Reputation acquired by Arts and Sciences.

BY the pride above described, I understand that noble self esteem which a nation possesses from the opinion of its superior talents, either as derived from their progenitors, or from their own ex­ertions.

This self-esteem is a natural consequence of the high opinion entertained of arts and sciences, and of their power over the human heart: it is in fact by their influence that the powers of the soul are un­folded, that the circle of its operations are en­larged, its comprehensive faculties encreased, and every spark of latent genius called into action. A man of an enlightned understanding perceives with ease the vulgar errors of mankind, the pre­judiced and vain-glorious ideas of all ages; he alone is able to judge of the wisdom, propriety, truth, and beauty of any sentiment or action. Similar to a being looking down from the Em­pyrean on this world, he beholds with com­posure, [Page 204] from his unclouded height, the mass of mankind yet wandering in darkness and error, their mistakes and deviations, and the gloomy tempests that rage in the deep glens below him. The sciences collectively teach the soul duly to appreciate its own greatness, and fill it with dis­gust for the sanguinary laurels of military fame. Darius was already vanquished, and Asia subju­gated, when Alexander wrote to his preceptor Aristotle that he had, much rather be exalted above all mortals by superior knowledge, than by the magnitude of his power; and in Corinth, he had long before declared, that if he were not Alexander, he should like to be Diogenes.

This noble sentiment is felt by a whole nation when it has produced a number of eminent men. The memory of those worthies who lived for their country, is as dear to well informed minds as that of the heroes who died for their country. Every nation is proud of its learned men, its philosophers, and its artists, as soon as they have paid their tri­bute to envy by their death; for those nations who are most vain of their great men when dead, are often the most backward to acknowledge their worth while living. It is only for those who lie mouldering in their graves, and who can no more be objects of jealousy, to enjoy a reputation which envy cannot harm; and with these limitations we [Page 205] may say that the fame of a nation in sciences, pro­ceeds from the fame of some of its individuals, ac­cording to the measure of the genius and the ideas of all its members.

Those who have enlightened their country by their talents, who have strengthened it by their philosophy, and adorned it by their genius, are, if I may be allowed the expression, Atlases, who support the name and dignity of their nation, and transmit them unimpared to future ages. Their noblest part lives and is active when they are no more; and their names and knowledge, snatched from oblivion by their writings, are legacies be­queathed to the whole world. We admire the impressions of their expanded souls, which appear in the memorials which they have left for our astonishment and instruction; in them still breathes their genius; in them still burns the consecrated fire of patriotism; thence it has darted into the breasts of the great men who have succeeded them; thence, even at this moment, perhaps, a spark flies off, which may infuse new life into a whole exani­mate posterity; may awaken their regret for having lost the precious inheritance, and by a contempla­tion of the sublime eminence whence they have fall­en inflame their hearts with a noble emulation of its grandeur.

[Page 206]The Greeks conceived, that for consolation in adversity, deliverance from danger, the extension of their fame, and the lustre of their actions, they were solely indebted to their sages. In fact, many of the Athenians who fell into slavery by Nicias's unfortunate expedition against Sicily, owed their preservation to Euripides, whose verses they recited to their masters; and in general their literati were so famous, that a king of Persia, when he admitted some Grecian ambassadors to an audience, first of all enquired of them, how the Poet Aristophanes did? Without the father of poetry, Achilles him­self would have been buried in eternal oblivion. Raised to the throne by courage and probity, and filled with the animating spirit of Grecian know­ledge, Ptolemy Philadelphus made his capital city of Alexandria the metropolitan seat of arts and sciences. He founded the museum, the most an­cient and most sumptuous temple ever erected by any monarch, in honour of learning; he filled it with men of abilities, and made it an asylum for philosophers of all descriptions, whose doctrines were misunderstood, and whose persons were per­secuted; in whose unfeigned tribute of grateful praise, he has found a surer road to everlasting re­nown, than his haughty nameless predecessors, who pretended to immortality, and braved both heaven and corroding time by the solid structure of their [Page 207] pyramids, which have outlived the memory of their builders.

Rome arose from conquest to literature, from the knowledge of the worth of valour to the know­ledge of the worth of the arts and sciences. The arms of this mighty people had indeed subdued Greece, but Greece could prove to the Romans, that greatness of genius can exalt the slave above his master; and that supereminence is attainable at a distance from the seat of victory and the ruins of demolished thrones.

The fall of the republic seemed to fix the sta­bility of the empire of the arts. The world sub­mitted to the absolute sway of one, and, tired of war and slaughter, the tyrant Augustus became a pro­tector of the muses. Virgil read his poetry to him in the imperial palace; the first minister of state was appointed to relieve him when he became tired of reading: overcome by his divine numbers, Octavia swooned at his feet; and Augustus was melted into tears. The Emperor chose Horace for his favourite, but Horace had the courage to decline that honour. Rome, even in chains, was rendered great and illustrious by its writers, whose renown became that of the empire and its pride.

[Page 208]The admiration so liberally bestowed on their fellow citizens, who had exalted themselves by the greatness of their genius, was the most fruitful nursery for great men, both among the Greeks and the Romans. Athens had erected the busts and statues of its meritorious children in the Cerami­cus, and Greece was filled with the like monu­ments of desert. Their renown assailed on every side minds which burnt with impatience to deserve the same honours. The Roman youth, when they beheld the images of their illustrious ancestors, ex­posed in public on the celebration of certain solemn ceremonies, were so forcibly struck with veneration for their virtues, that the graves seemed to open, and the shades of the dead to appear on earth, in order to teach them, in the language of the im­mortals, the way to every thing great, sublime and, praise-worthy.

A nation cannot be more powerfully impelled to the love of science and of virtue, than when it con­templates domestic examples of them, with a noble pride of heart. Every nation ought to respect and esteem those by whom it has been enlightened and improved; it ought to reverence their images; to celebrate their memories; and all hearts should glow with the desire of being equally great and illustrious. The pride which arises in consequence of the opinion of the superiority of our talents [Page 209] and knowledge above all other people, was accord­ingly peculiarly prevalent both among the Grecians and the Romans.

Athens, even under Pericles, astonished its neigh­bours by the master pieces of its artists and sages. Pericles, who immortalized the memory of his heroes by Phidias's art, who raised the genius of Attica to its highest pitch of elevation by his un­exampled eloquence, was the soul of Athens. It is impossible to peruse the travels of Pausanias through this beautiful country, without being pene­trated with the most ardent admiration. We lis­ten with rapture to the description of the many master-pieces he enumerates; every spot of Greece teemed with the most exquisite productions of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and the whole in a manly and genuine elegance of taste. Greece produced for a long series of ages great men of every description, who, stimulated by their creative genius, deviated from the beaten track, and struck out new and untried paths to immortality. All their productions bore the stamp of nature in its greatest beauty, and glowed in the colours of truth. Despising the common conveniences of life, they travelled over the remotest lands, to expand and invigorate the powers of their minds. And the vestiges which the Romans have left us of their greatness, and of their desire of eternal fame, in all [Page 210] the three continents of the ancient world, are not only monuments of their religious veneration for their great men, but at the same time as many me­morials of their own pride.

Italy, England, and France, approach in modern times the nearest to Greece and Rome, by the just estimation of their respective merits in the arts and sciences.

The Italians are, with reason, proud of the repu­tation of their nation in the arts and sciences. The Italian cities had scarcely reared the standard of li­berty, before the light which had previously illu­minated Greece and Rome, burst through the shades of the Gothic chaos; the flame of these re­volutions vivified the arts and sciences, and pro­duced immortal master-pieces of every kind. By the liberal employ of the riches, an extensive com­merce and flourishing manufactures had brought to Florence, and impelled by that desire of fame which patronizes the operations of genius, and gives birth to the noblest designs and actions, this city strove for the attainment of every species of renown. Europe beheld patriotism, sound policy, and mili­tary fame, regenerated together with the arts and sciences, the sources of which had so long been dried up during the barbarous ignorance of the middle ages. Florence was before and under the [Page 211] Medici what Athens was in the zenith of its glory. Italy, priestly Italy, was of all the European states the first where the fine arts were cultivated, pro­tected, encouraged, and rewarded. From that country were emitted the first sparks which an­nounced and kindled the brightest flame of return­ing knowledge. A Franciscan monk, advanced to the papal throne, Sextus the Fifth, contributed more to the embellishment of Rome in his short pontificate of five years, than Augustus, the lord and master of the riches of the world, in a reign of forty. From Italy came those sciences, which have since produced such abundant fruits in the rest of Europe; to her we are in particular in­debted for the fine arts, and it is from her nume­rous inimitable productions, that we owe the good taste now so universally diffused among us.

The veneration of the Italians for great men essentially contributed to their formation. Florence is crowded with monuments erected to perpetuate their fame both by the sovereigns and private individuals of the country. The house built by the celebrated Viviana, very near Santa Maria Novella, exhibits a striking mark of his gratitude towards the famous Gallileo, whose disciple he always called himself; the front of the house is decorated with the statue in bronze of this renovator of one of the most sublime sciences; and on the pannels, [Page 212] between the windows are inscribed the dates and particular descriptions of those discoveries with which Gallileo enriched the magazine of know­ledge.

The esteem of the Florentines for these monu­ments erected during the age of the fine arts is so great, that they hold it a kind of sacrilege even to clean, scrape, and polish those images, which, standing in the open air, generally undergo an ab­lution in the spring. The hundred and sixty public statues, which strike the eye of a stranger, and attract his notice as much as the finest ornaments of the most flourishing city of Greece did Pau­sanias, are exposed to all the injuries of the weather, and entirely left to the care of the populace who respect them as sacred relics. This respect descends from parent to child, and is founded on a taste for the sublime and beautiful, which the habit of seeing such things admired and hearing them praised ren­ders natural; and this habitual attachment to the fine arts is so inherent in the Italians, that the ladies of Rome and Florence can discourse with as much propriety on the subject, as ever a German professor did on the science he practises.

The Florentines bear a striking similitude to the ancient Athenians, in the veneration they profess for whatever has any relation to their country. [Page 213] Florence is in their eyes with respect to the whole of Europe, what Athens in the famous panegyric of Isocrates is represented to be with respect to all the rest of Greece. They view in Florence every excellence of every kind and every age; and, in regarding other nations, owing to this self-esteem, they behold nothing but barbarity and ignorance; they fancy that they alone have invented, pro­duced, and practised every thing that is useful or agreeable.

Among other incontestible instances of the gross ignorance of foreigners, the Florentines relate with great self-complacency the following story of a Rus­sian nobleman. He was viewing the celebrated collection of Baron Stosch: "And this," said his con­ductor, "is the bust of my Lord."—"What, is the original so antique?" rejoined the Russian, in the tone of a connoisseur. But nothing can exceed the conduct of the confessor of Charles the Third of Spain in the library of the Medici: this confessor, a reformed Franciscan or Cordelier, accompanied the young prince when he went to take possession of his Tuscan territories; being the only person in his suite who bore any appearance of scholarship in his dress, the librarian presuming his curiosity could be no better satisfied than by the view of that superb collection of books, one of the most brilliant memorials the munificence of princes had dedicated [Page 214] to literature, immediately waited on him with a respectful invitation to see the library of the Medici. He accepted the invitation, and appointed a day; the librarian had assembled all the most eminent literati of Florence, who being joined by the con­fessor, he proceeded with this splendid retinue to­wards the library. On coming to the door, he stop­ped short, cast a vacant look round the saloon, and turning to the superintendant, said, "Pray, Mr. Librarian, have you got the book of the Seven Trumpets here?" The librarian replied, that it was not in the collection, and the whole learned com­pany were obliged to confess with some confusion, that they were unacquainted with such a book; upon which the confessor, turning his back upon the library, declared that the whole of it was not worth a single pipe of tobacco. It was afterwards discovered, that this book of the Seven Trumpets was a collection of the most improbable devout stories, wrote in Spanish, by a Monk of the order of St. Francis, the translation whereof forms part of the contents of those books printed in France under the title of Bibliotheque Bleue.

But Italy, once the empress of the world, is now the scene of desolation and rapine, and dependant upon those nations who were formerly her slaves; once the protectress of all arts and sciences, she is now reproached with slumbering over her faded [Page 215] laurels; she is now again reduced to a state of in­significancy, from the height which the founders of her modern fame, Gallileo and Columbus, had raised her; by the discovery of new worlds on earth by the latter, and in the heavens by the for­mer; the seeds from which those truly great men sprung are yet in existence, but torpid and inactive, without a shoot, or without a single leaf of honour. The Italians have for near a century ceased to be like themselves. They have before their eyes master-pieces of art and models of good taste, examples of the talents of their ancestors; but these precious remains are an unprofitable heap to them, and neither kindle the fire of genius, nor incite the labouring hand of industry to emulation. We must not visit Italy for the sake of the Italians, but for the sake of the country they inhabit.

These reproaches, it is true, are carried rather too far, and are the more grating to the Italians, as there are few nations so sensible of the esteem of foreigners. Philosophy, mathematics, physics, na­tural history, the art of medicine, and the fine arts, are nearly as flourishing in Italy as in France or En­gland. Most of the Italian universities make it their study to prevent the prostitution of the sublimest sciences, by the trite and dry application of them, to the injury of mankind, which has so long prevail­ed in the seminaries of monkish learning. Both the [Page 216] nobility and the higher orders of the clergy think it not beneath them to rival one another in every species of human knowledge; while at the same time, as well through the whole of Italy as at Rome, the common people are completely ig­norant and unprincipled, and have no other op­portunity for instruction, than the very seldom occurring executions of malefactors. The taste for solid knowledge encreases every day in Italy; many of their authors write with freedom, and their ideas are not invariably fettered to ancient pre­judices. The modern Italian philosophers break the bands of hierarchy and despotism with an al­most unexampled boldness. We need only read the work of a noble Italian, on the reformation of Italy, the treatise on crimes and punishments of the immortal Beccaria, the Coffee-house, an Italian weekly publication, in comparison with which the English Spectator seems to be only written for women; the reflections of an Italian on the church in general, on the regular and secular clergy, and the head of the church, and we shall be ashamed of harbouring the thought that Italy is totally de­prived of genius.

In all the sciences and almost in all the arts, the English are as eminent as men can be, and, we may easily perceive are too conscious of their excellence. By the honours they confer on their meritorious [Page 217] countrymen, they give the most convincing proof how proud they are of their merit.

In no country of the world are rank, birth, and every thing that is not personal, held so essentially different and distinct from merit. In Germany, on the appearance of a stranger, the first question is, "whether he is a nobleman?" in Holland, "has he money?" but in England, "what sort of a man is he?" In the reign of Henry the Eighth, a lord com­plained to the king of an affront he had suffered from the painter Holbein: "Let Holbein alone," said the king, "for I can whenever I please make seven lords of seven ploughmen, but I cannot make one Holbein of even seven lords." A minister of state, in England, is a kind of intermediate being, between an angel and the worst of the human species. The Earl of Chatham is deified by some, and ill-spoken of by others, and yet merit is no where else in the world so justly appreciated as in England. This people, often so turbulent and unruly, under the pretence of liberty, forego hatred, enmity, sect, and party, when they are called upon to reward great talents. Where the ashes of their kings repose, there repose likewise those of their heroes, of their poets, and of their men of genius of every description. The remains of an actress, which in France have no better receptacle than a dunghill, are interred in [Page 218] England next to those of the greatest statesman. Newton received in this nation, fertile in great men, extraordinary honours when living, and after his decease he was carried in regal pomp to this silent repository, sacred to the memory of monarchs and departed genius. The honours so liberally be­stowed upon great talents in England, have in every age induced the noblest among its peers to inter­weave the bays with their coronets; and the most abstruse disquisitions are as common in daily con­versation there, as disputes concerning a new head­dress, or a fashionable ragout in France.

The English owe the greater degree of liberty they enjoy above other nations, to the superiority of their knowledge. Animated by a spirit of free­dom, of which no adequate idea can be formed, even in most republics, they fasten upon the sci­ences as a tyger on its prey; they meditate on the great interests of nations, and of mankind, with the most daring expansion of thought; they are ever taken up with great objects, and ever doing great things. Ignorance and error shrink from the penetrating vision of their genius; arbitrary power trembles before their vigorous investigation of its principles, while the authority of the law alone stands immoveable and sacred. The greatest part of such nations as are free, think and act but by halves; while on the other hand, the English [Page 219] soar with a steady flight to the skies, because their wings are not clipped, neither are they called back by the lure of the falconer.

The merits of the French with which they them­selves are well acquainted, very often burst forth with transcendant splendour. We are too much accustomed to see them in a ridiculous point of view; whereas an eulogium upon them would be more easily composed than a satire.

The present men of genius among them are supereminently great. They seem at once adapted to every thing worthy the attention of man: they scan the heavens, and possess the greatest refine­ment of sensibility; they claim our admiration when they enlarge our ideas on the most abstruse sciences, and our tears when they charm us with an affecting narrative of misfortune; and all their writings possess the most inimitable elegance. Order, method, and energetic perspicuity are their own; every thing superfluous, low, or trivial is banished from their plan; every thought is placed in its most advantageous light. Even when they super­ficially and lightly approach the outworks of science, they do it with such penetration, that they seem at every step to pierce into the deepest sanctuaries of knowledge. They decide with dignity, and dis­pute with mildness; and above all other nations, [Page 220] they possess the invaluable art of being both phi­losophers and men of the world, studying by the midnight lamp, and at the same time avoiding pedantry.

The French have in particular given the sciences an attic elegance. Their drama, considered alto­gether surpasses that of every other modern nation; and they have brought to greater perfection than any other people, the most useful and most agree­able of all arts, that of good manners and a socia­bility; they have carried natural philosophy, poli­tics, commerce, finances, and the imitative arts to their greatest height. The numerous institutions and rewards for learning of every kind in France give it a striking advantage, awakening diligence and emulation; and, to these, France owes the exalted degree of renown it has attained in astro­nomy, and in tactics: philosophy is advancing with rapid strides among them; all mankind at present think on every thing, and the French as much as any other nation. Did their great men not bow their heads so low to a sex, who highly prize whatever is trifling, and ridicule whatever is truly great, to a sex, to whom we will gladly resign the empire of the heart provided they leave us that of the mind, still more might be expected and derived from them.

There is another sort of equitable self esteem, which arises from the awakening of a people to a [Page 221] sense of their own natural advantages; and though the benefits which accrue from it are often mis­understood and cried down, it nevertheless em­braces, in my opinion, every thing that can be called great and noble. I mean that spirit of liberty which the writings of the English have created and cherished in the hearts of the French; and which instils into the soul of a Parisian philoso­pher, in his attic dwelling, on the seventh story, the just and necessary pride due to the true dignity and freedom of his character as a citizen of the world^*. This spirit does honour to human nature, [Page 222] and administers consolation and encouragement to depressed humanity, while employed in removing, with a tender but steady hand, the film of prejudice from the eyes of mankind. The English prepos­terously think the French are a nation of slaves; but it is ridiculous to despise them as slaves, for there are many Frenchmen, even at the foot of the throne, who have souls as free as the freest English­man; and there are some of the writers of the Encyclopaedia who are more determined repub­licans than most of the jurists either in Holland or in Switzerland, and they are publicly known to be such, and are yet respected.

Most of the parliaments of France examine and ascertain the true interests of the nation and of the king, with a noble and unshackled eloquence; they lay before the throne the blessings and the love of all ranks, in order to procure security, peace, and the hope of better days to the palaces of the great, and the cottages of the poor. Their hearts are not cast down by oppression; their souls are capable of the greatest and noblest sentiments; and they are ready, at the risk of their own ease, of their wealth, and of their places, undauntedly to utter the voice of reason and of truth. This species of liberty consists in the uncontrolled exercise of one's faculties; it does not owe its origin to a form of government, but to sound judgment and philosophy; and is so [Page 223] much more laudable than that species necessarily arising from the political constitution of a country, in proportion as it has greater difficulties to sur­mount. A nation, therefore may be justly and greatly proud of its liberty of opinion, when it does think with freedom, and not because it may.

The merit of individuals in the arts and sciences, therefore, produces in a nation a very justifiable pride, which, as long as it is kept within proper li­mits, elevates the mind, banishes superstition and ancient prejudices by the aid of philosophy and sound judgement, and exalts the spirit of liberty the more the various principles and opinions of a na­tion are canvassed and investigated.

Chapter XIV. Of Pride produced in a Nation by its Constitution.

IN the same manner as we contemplate with awe, an august temple in its ruins, so do we reve­rence that frame and constitution of things, existing in our peculiar country, even until the last moments of liberty.

The pride that is produced in a nation by its frame of government, I define to be the sense of the high and pre-eminent value of its constitution. A wild, headstrong, lawless youth prefers a democratical government; a cunning and intriguing man, a monarchy; the self-interested, that government which insures the greatest personal profits to him­self; a noble and philanthropic soul, that under which the greatest number of men are rendered happy and prosperous: but in general we may ob­serve the most deeply rooted, and, in my opinion, the best founded pride, in those countries whose inhabitants are most subordinate to duty, and least so to each other; and where, for that reason, as [Page 226] much civil liberty may be found as is consistent with the existence of society.

It is extremely difficult for every government to inspire its subjects with a sense of its own peculiar excellence; but it is not difficult for subjects to love the constitution of their country; which al­ways ought to be an object of respect and venera­tion. A man of sense may find happiness under every moderate government; one spark of inward content is sufficient to embellish all around him. We often see complaints urged against the best go­vernments; but we ought to consider, that the be­neficial fruits of laws, and of the administration of government, are in general invisible, and never im­mediately apparent; while, on the contrary, the smallest and most unavoidable evils are instantly per­ceptible, and are converted by exaggeration and misrepresentation into the most frightful phantoms to appal the brainless populace.

We may be happy under the shelter of civil liberty, both in republics and in monarchies; in the former, indeed, by right, in the latter by chance; and in fact, equally so in every country where whole­some laws are the rules by which men are govern­ed, or where the will of a just and enlightened prince is the supreme law.

Chapter XV. Of Republican Pride.

IN all republics we may find this pride; but I do not here allude to those in which republicans may in vain be looked for at mid-day with a candle and lanthorn.

I call a republican, the man in whom the love of freedom, of his country, and of the laws, to­gether with the execration of despotism, are pre­dominant. Others may give a very different defini­tion; but, if mine should be the true one, it can­not be denied that there may be great and genuine republican souls in monarchies, as well as abject and servile ones in republics.

Pride in republics, is the consciousness of the liberty, equality, and security we enjoy under a republican government. Liberty is that state of mankind in which our actions, if they are just, and founded upon rational principles, cannot be controlled by any external force. Our will to [Page 228] perform, however, must be subject to our reason, for we cannot will any thing without a motive. If a man, in this state of society, wills any thing that is bad, there is always a power withstanding him, which prevents the execution of his will, if he listens to its dictates; but by this power he is not deprived of his civil liberty; for freedom, in a state of society, only allows us to satisfy our real necessities in an irreprehensible manner; if in any state it allows of more, it degenerates into licen­tiousness: and this idea of liberty, is perfectly descriptive of the situation of a republican; he wills as long as his will is not repugnant to the laws.

Mules tread with a sure foot, along the brink of a precipice, and they are, therefore, in such places, left to their own guidance: but man is not so for­tunately gifted; for, without the restraint of law, liberty could not exist in a state of society. The will is more frequently guided by the blindness of instinct, than by the sober light of reason; and the law itself is, therefore, often not sufficiently coercive to keep men within due bounds: on which account it has been found necessary, in all republics, to con­fide in a number of citizens who have deserved well of their country, or are esteemed worthy to serve it, the care of watching over the laws, of carrying them into execution, and of changing and new-modelling [Page 229] them, as a change of circumstances and times may require. Liberty, therefore, does not consist in having no power on earth superior to ourselves, but in this superior power not existing in the arbi­trary will of one. Where this power resides in the absolute will of many, there ought to be such pro­visions in the law, by which one will always be pre­vented from mastering or controlling the others; where there are such laws the most eminent man is but the first subject of the law; and wherever no one is exempt from its sway, none can be the slave of another.

Those constitutions which are most free have al­ways required the strictest obedience, because free­dom can only be supported by the maintenance of the laws. In order to accustom the people to sub­mission to the law, in the most trifling and indiffer­ent matters, the Ephori of Sparta, on their entrance into office, had it proclaimed, by the sound of a trum­pet, that every Spartan should cut off his whiskers; for they were anxious to have all their laws observed with the same willingness and readiness, as that which permitted a young fellow to ask leave of an old man, who might have a youthful wife, to beget him a child.

Hence, republican liberty leaves man in the pos­session of his original rights, so far as he can enjoy them compatibly with the rights of society. The [Page 230] exemption from that miserable fate which makes man, sunk from his inherent dignity, submit to be a slave, not indeed because he wills, but because he must, strengthens the soul, expands the understand­ing, and enlarges the ideas, giving to every faculty, fire, vigour and energy. Pure liberty is only found in the noble bosom that abhors all chains, whether the golden ones of kings, or the iron ones of repub­lics, which do not admit even a superficial gilding. Every free soul at court sighs after black bread and liberty. Here its all-vivifying energy produces a certain natural artless eloquence, on which depends the most important civil and political concerns; as it is the most proper instrument sometimes to appease the multitude, sometimes to rouse, often to con­vince, but oftener to persuade. There its mild and benevolent power extends over philosophy, for those who entirely disrobe truth, must of necessity ap­proach the nearest to it.

Equality is held to be the exclusive advantage of those republics, where every member of the com­monwealth can arise to the first dignities of the state; where their election depends upon the peo­ple in general; and where those dignities are not in any case hereditary. But the system of absolute moral equality among men is false and absurd, be­cause society can only esteem a man according to the probable proportion of his ability to contribute [Page 231] towards the public good, and because even the possible proportion of that ability does not at all keep pace with the number of men; for there is always a much greater number of citizens than of statesmen, or men of parts. A single citizen who has saved his country, is worth a hundred thousand others, and he ought to have as much sway as that hundred thousand. By a situation of legal equality, therefore, I understand, in general, that situation in which every member of the state is equally secured from every species of violence; and therefore naturally proud of his equality in point of personal liberty, and his superiority in that respect to the subject of a monarchical form of govern­ment.

This equality is observable in all free countries, where the little do not stand in awe of the great, but both yield obedience to the laws whose sub­jects they are; where a man is not accounted a criminal, because he may have incurred the anger of a grandee, and where the poor are looked upon as making part of mankind. The founders of the ancient republics thought absolute equality so in­dispensably necessary, that they divided the land they possessed in equal shares to every citizen: a potent measure, but which in these times would be chimerical and impracticable, to augment the love and fidelity of every member of the common­wealth, [Page 232] towards his country. In former times, the acquisition of too great personal consideration was looked upon as a crime against the state; because wherever any one was exalted above the law, all others must be dependent on him. The punish­ment of the Ostracism was introduced by the Athenians, solely with the view of securing the re­public from the predominancy of great men over the lower class. Proceeding on the same principle, the Venetians once condemned one of their magis­trates to death, because he had, of a sudden, ap­peased a very dangerous sedition; for, they said, "he who can so easily pacify such an insurrection, is able to raise one at any time." For the same reason, in some modern republics, no man can with impunity be noble, wealthy, just, or eminent for his talents. Instead of striving with a competitor worthy of rivalship, a great man finds a competitor in every fool: and for this reason, a peasant of the canton of Appenzel once shrewdly remarked to my friend, the worthy Dr. Hirzell, "that the inhabitants of a certain republican city had cut off the head of one of their fellow-citizens, because it was the only head among them."

In some modern republics, the legal inequality of rank and consideration is concealed as much as possible under the appearance of equality; the chief men treat each other as if they were all of the same [Page 233] rank, equally wealthy, and all upon a level with respect to understanding and virtue. In republics, superior merit, unscreened by the reverence which in monarchies is attached to the privileged orders, is always the prey of envy, wherefore the chiefs treat the subjects of their republic, collectively, with affability, courtesy, and love; they seem all to affect those beneficient virtues, which proceed from an enlightened understanding and are the true cause of the preference given to rule over happy and free men rather than over a hero of slaves. The Carni­val was merely instituted at Venice with a view of hiding the great inequality of conditions in that republic, for a few months in the year, under masks of the same kind; and even Cosmo de Medicis ex­ercised his power in Florence, over a people who esteemed liberty as Heaven's best gift, without any exterior mark to distinguish him from the other citizens, and as he himself used to say, in an old great coat.

The self-esteem of a republican, which has the justest foundation, is that arising from the sense of personal security. This advantage is seldom found in democracies, where a state of uncurbed freedom is generally a feverish paroxysm, in which the body politic cannot long remain. This security did not exist in the Grecian states, where every thing submitted to the caprice of an haughty, blind, and [Page 234] passionate multitude, pushing all their passions to excess, and condemning in rage to-morrow, what they approved with rapture to-day. This advantage was, above all, wanting at Athens, where the power of the mob was unlimited, and the authority of the magistrates an empty name; where the commands of the council were eluded, and its decisions annul­led, when they happened not to coincide with the opinions of an insolent populace, whose assemblies were often nothing but a solemn invitation to the perpetration of iniquity.

On the contrary, in republics of a mixed consti­tution, we may with justice look for security, and especially in those aristocratical states which, by the stability of their laws and the splendor of their government, most resemble a limited monarchy; and which, for that very reason, are preferable to all other republican constitutions. Under such an administration, every individual is sure of justice; and the summary mode of doing one's self right by the stiletto, or a pocket pistol, is solely in vogue on the other side the Alps, where justice is either too slow or too expensive. Each preserves his own property, and thinks himself happy because he cul­tivates his field for himself, and pays nothing for that liberty which is elsewhere obtained, only by submitting to the most exorbitant exactions.— Lord and master of himself and his property, he [Page 235] has to account to no one for his income, or his expenditure; and is amenable to no authority but that of the law, for what he does, or what he neglects; and to talk of the absolute will of one, excites his derision. A nobler pride, therefore, cannot arise in the breast of a republican, than when he considers the abject situation of the sub­jects of despotism, depending entirely on the blind will of one.

Despotism in a state, is like malignity in bodily diseases; sometimes it is the chief aliment, at others, only an adventitious symptom. But whenever one individual obtains the power, he generally acquires at the same time the will of becoming a tyrant, for most men are too fond of fashioning law after their own will. The desire of commanding over our equals, is the reigning passion of the human soul; and the rage of superiority resides in every heart, but mostly where it is accompanied by a weak head. That republic, however, will soon be enslaved by a tyrant, where men are base enough to shew a cringing submission to the opinions or consideration of one man, whatever pre-eminent advantages he may enjoy above the rest of the community. There are instances of this in many petty cities, pretending to be free, in which the whole little body of the state, notwithstanding their boasted independence, follow, like a flock of sheep, [Page 236] the opinions and will of one alone; and where this sort of tyranny is looked upon as a family right, nay an inheritance, which may pass down unim­paired even in the female line: But we need not be very quick-sighted, to perceive what actuates those spirits in places of the above description, who are implacable and sworn enemies of all the patriots of Europe; and who maintain, with brazen foreheads, that whoever stands up in favour even of constitu­tional liberty in a free country is literally a rebel.

But I do not mean, at present to treat of any other kind of despotism, than that surrounded by guards, which sits on the thrones of kings, on the seats of princes, or, at least, in their neighbourhood; under whose iron sceptre, all who unfortunately live within its reach, must bow, and whose principles and actions they are forced to approve, however re­pugnant or inimical to the happiness, or even to the existence of a whole nation.

In such countries, it is the tyrant alone who is allowed to have a will; and he does all he wills, even while he wills nought but what injures the rights of man. Whatever he covets, must be con­formable to divine and human laws; and he but seldom desires what is not prohibited. Cambyses, the successor of Cyrus, wished to marry his own sister, and inquired of his sages, whether there was [Page 237] no law by which such a marriage could be allowed? These lawyers, not less ingenious and subtile than those of modern times, replied, "There is no law that permits the marriage of a brother with his sister, but there is one that says, whatever a king thinks shall be law."

This is the sole rule of despots; as well of him who sits on a throne, as of him who fills the inter­mediate space between the monarch and the subject; or even of those tyrants in miniature, a despotic no­bility, possessing power of life and death over the peasantry, attached to the soil like cattle. Unac­quainted with the feelings of humanity, a tyrant looks down on his subjects as beasts of the field, sent into the world to be miserable, and to live and die under his yoke, as animals which he feeds because they are adapted to hard labour; which he has care taken of when they are sick, because they are useful when in health; which he fattens, that he may consume their fat; and which he in the end flays, to make their hides serve to harness others under the same yoke.

It is in consequence of this, that the subjects of a despotic government make so beggarly an appear­ance; their dwellings are on this account cramped, their furniture mean, their whole appearance penu­rious and squalid, and both themselves and their [Page 238] cattle the living images of famine; not even a dog is to be found in tolerable plight; the gardens, the groves, the bushes are destitute of their feathered songsters; all is solitary and forlorn; the poor birds fly far away to happier climes, to avoid the eager pursuit of the half-starved peasants, whom stern necessity often renders expert fowlers. The fields lie uninclosed, and are tilled with reluctance and sorrow. No cheering prospect of meadows or of cultivated fields relieve the eye; no barns, no cow-houses, no hillocks of rich manuring dung, no horses for the plough, which, on the contrary, is dragged o'er the half-furrowed fields by a lean ass, a lame cow, and an old goat, yoked together; and to complete the picture of misery, behold in the back ground, the husbandman either driven to despair and suicide, or to rage and murder, by the oppression and cruelty of this arbitrary government.

How shall the prince, reposing in the lap of luxury and ease, perceive the distresses, the wants, and the universal despondency of his famished and desolate provinces? He acquires his revenue with tranquility and composure, as long as any thing is offered. Every thing that surrounds him conspires to shut his eyes and ears to the tears and groans of his people; and the most reasonable complaints urged against his counsellors are punished as offences against majesty itself. His agents do not cease tell­ing [Page 239] him, he may and can do whatever he pleases, in order that he may allow them to do what they please; they continually assure him his people are happy, even at the moment they are busy in squeezing the last drop of sweat and blood out of them: and if they sometimes take the ability of the nation into consideration, their view is only to calculate how many moments it can live under their gripe, without entirely giving up the ghost.

The above is a true picture of Morocco, since the Cheriffs have brought it under their yoke; the religion, the laws, the ancient customs, the pre­judices imbibed by the Moors, all contribute to render the power of the monarch absolute and un­limited; and the subjects a despicable herd, a flock of timorous sheep, without activity or will. His power extends not only over their lives and pro­perty, but likewise over their consciences; of which, as representative of their holy prophet Mahomet, he is the spiritual director. The people are edu­cated from their infancy in the notion, that to die by the command of the emperor, confers an undoubt­ed right to the joys of Paradise; and the honour to be dispatched by the emperor's own hand, a di­ploma for a more exalted degree of beatitude. This explains the otherwise unaccountable instances we see in Morocco of cruelty, oppression, and tyranny on one side, and of slavery, submission, and misery [Page 240] on the other. The emperor is both legislator and judge, and, when he is in the humour, the execu­tioner too, of his people; the sole heir of their possessions, of which he grants to the nearest rela­tions as much as he thinks fit. Yet he allows a shadow of authority, in matters of religion, to the Mufti; and he graciously permits his meanest sub­ject to institute a suit at law against himself, in which the plaintiff is not only sure to be non-suited, but also to be involved in the most unavoidable perdition.

Muley Ismael, emperor of Morocco, killed with his own hand, during the time he reigned, forty thousand of his subjects; yet he was in a very particular manner attached to justice. One of his officers complained to him that his wife, when in ill-humour, had a custom of pulling him by his beard; and the emperor was so provoked at the impudence of this woman, that, in order to prevent her from again offending the majesty of his officer's countenance, he caused the hairs of his beard to be plucked out, one by one, by the roots. He once saw another of his officers on the road, driving a flock of sheep before him: "Whose sheep are these?" interrogated the emperor; the officer re­plied with the deepest reverence, "O Ismael son of Elcheriff, of the seed of Hassan, they are mine." "Thine, villain?" said the servant of the [Page 241] Lord, as the emperor is styled, "thine? I thought I was the only proprietor in my dominions:" and immediately, thrusting his lance through the heart of the unfortunate sheep-driver, divided his flock among his guards. The only good deed that Muley Ismael, seems to have done in his life, was the deliverance of his empire from numerous bands of robbers; but even this only good action bore the stamp of his sanguinary character. He ordered the massacre of all the inhabitants, men, women, and children of a wide extent of country, round every place where a robbery had been committed. When he gave audience to foreign ministers, he was usually on horseback, in an open court; round him stood his several officers barefooted, trembling, bowed to the ground, and, at every word he uttered, they re­peated in chorus, "Great is the wisdom of our Lord, and the voice of our Lord is as the voice of an Angel from Heaven." But their Lord never dismissed an ambassdor till he had given him ocu­lar demonstration of his readiness and dexterity in murdering some of his subjects; and this enter­tainment generally concluded the ceremonies of audience.

Though all tyrants, it is true, do not act exactly like Muley Ismael, yet they go upon the same prin­ciple, that their will is the only law. I shall spare myself the chagrin of citing examples of christian [Page 242] princes, whose pleasure seems rather to consist in procreating their species, than in exterminating it; but who, in every other instance, are as lawless transgressors against humanity, but have not the candour to declare, what John Galeas, Duke of Milan said, "that he extirpated the robbers that infested his territories, only in order to be the only one of that vocation."

But Asia is the quarter of the globe where ty­ranny is ever wakeful and ever predominant, deeply fixing the eternal principles of destruction, under the pretence of momentary advantage; granting but the wretched consolation of tears and lamentations to the nations it devours, that the great and their instruments may live in plenty and security, who repay with interest, to the defenceless people, those lashes they receive from their lord. Property in land has been set aside in Turkey, Persia, and the Mogul empire: the governor of a province says, "Why should not I be a wolf, for I am master of the sheep-fold?" The countryman says, "Where­fore shall I labour for a tyrant, who will to-morrow plunder me of what I have to-day earned by the sweat of my brow?" When the Turkish bashaws travel, they are not content with eating the pea­sants out of house and home, consuming whatever is consumable; but, when with their numerous at­tendants their bellies are well filled, they are uncon­scientious [Page 243] enough to exact a contribution in money, which they call tooth-money, or an acknowledg­ment for the use of their teeth, which they have worn down by granting the farmer the honour of devouring his victuals. Hence the dreadful pictures travellers give us of the present situation of the Asiatic states: hence they say, that the formerly so happy Mosopotamia, blessed Palestine, and the ad­mired plains of Antioch, are now almost as miserable and as barren as the modern Campania of Rome; which is naked and desolate, destitute of inhabitants, without inclosures, without corn-fields, without a tree, without a bush, without houses, nay, nearly without even a bramble.

The power of the emperor of China is, in that civilized and praise-worthy country, absolute and unlimited: he represents a sort of deity; and the veneration shewn towards him approaches near to adoration; his discourses are listened to as oracles, and his decisions are followed as if they came im­mediately from the highest Heaven. In Persia, the commands of the king are punctually executed, although his majesty might happen to be drunk when he issued them. In Japan, it would be thought a derogation to the imperial dignity, if the emperor was to inflict any punishment less than death.

[Page 244]The vicissitude of fortune is no wher [...] so great as under despotic governments. Persian princes of the blood royal were compelled to become school-masters and ushers; and Kouli Khan left many of his ministers no other resource for their daily bread. The great men at court are hourly deprived of their places at Constantinople; and the longest life of those who are the most fortunate there, is nothing but a life of uncertainty, suspicion, and fear. Under the last dynasty in China, princes of the imperial blood were actually seen in the condition of porters, and only distinguished from others of the same vocation by their belts and cords being of yellow silk, which colour is exclusively permitted to the imperial family.

A cane, in China, supplies the place of the law. The courts of justice of this great empire cause their paternal corrections, as they are called, to be administered in twenty hard blows, which people of rank must submit to as well as the lower orders. The smallest oversight in words or gestures is punished with the bastinado; and when the of­fender is sufficiently cudgelled, he falls on his knees before the judge, bows his forehead thrice to the ground, and gives thanks for the care taken for his instruction and amendment.

The power of the emperor of China rests, like that of all other tyrants, upon the dastardy of his [Page 245] subjects; their abjectness is so great, that slavery is not even thought disgraceful. An opulent Tartar or Chinese mandarin has many slaves in his service, he himself is the slave of another greater court lord, and this last again the slave of the emperor. The Chinese in chains have lost every thing, even the wish of breaking them.

Despotism is said to have no where been so mild and moderate, as in the kingdom of Tanjour, on the coast of Coromandel. Raguola Naicher, who occupied this throne in the last century, was so just and equitable that his memory is still revered; he took but two thirds of the fruits of the earth from his subjects, and in the night he caused search to be made after such as might stand in need of relief.

A true republican must therefore necessarily be justly proud of a government under which he enjoys liberty and security, when he considers, that in the moral as well as the physical world there are large and small pismires, between whom there exists such an inveterate and inborn hatred, that the great never rest till they have exterminated the little ones.

Chapter XVI. Of Pride in Monarchies.

I HAVE somewhere read, that men are sel­dom fit to govern themselves, and that their vanity submits with less reluctance to the dominion of one, than the equality of many.

These are not the opinions entertained in repub­lics on this head; but in this Chapter I shall depart a good deal from my own ideas, and offer in lieu of them, the observations and opinions of subjects of monarchical states, in order to explain more clearly how that form of government can elevate the heart.

By pride in monarchical states, I understand, the elevation of mind felt by a whole nation, when it finds itself peculiarly happy in the person of its sovereign; the power of doing good without limit­ation, the power of doing evil without the will, promises a golden age to the people as long as the will of the monarch is directed by great and good [Page 248] views. The glory of that empire, which in Europe most looks up to its king, will always be superior to that of any other empire on earth, as long as its king is what he ought to be.

The subjects of a monarchy are, in our times, by no means all abject creatures, unless by their absurd cowardice they make themselves so. We now see benevolent monarchs filling European thrones, friends to the pacific virtues, to the arts and sci­ences; fathers of their people, crowned citizens; and ministers at their sides, who equally deserve a crown. The ancients had no idea of the temperate system of our monarchies; their governments were either entirely republican or entirely despotic. They did not know that the time would come when those barbarous ages would be no more, when a tyrant assumed an absolute control over our thoughts and actions; and that the subject of a monarchy could be as much a citizen, as the citizen of the freest republican state is a subject. They did not know that the time would come when the same might be said of limited monarchies which they boasted of in their republics, that not man but law was the sovereign. They did not know that order, system, and perseverance could exist under the shade of monarchical power; that property might be secured, and that we may sit down in the circle of our duties at ease, and duly [Page 249] attend to them; while all the arts flourish around us, every thing excites to emulation, and the sovereign may live in the midst of his people like a father among his children.

It is a discovery of the present age, that a certain spirit of freedom can exist under a kingly govern­ment. The spirit of liberty of a Montesquieu, a d'Alembert, an Helvetius, a Mably, a Chalotais, a Thomas, a Marmontel, and so many other French­men of the first rank in literature, is the greatest satire on the notion entertained by some respect­ing republics; and it tends to prove that monarchy produces sometimes as great effects, and contributes as much to universal felicity as republicanism itself. All depends immediately upon the king in person, or upon his prime minister. We always see that their manners have as much influence on liberty as the laws; that they can turn men into beasts, and beasts into men; that they will have subjects when they love free souls, and slaves when they prefer base and sordid minds. The Duke of Choiseul's name and memory will be cherished by the latest posterity; for he has required some of the best heads in France to examine the principles of his ad­ministration, and to judge of its effects on the hap­piness or misery of that great kingdom; and he has promised to avail himself of the lights they may fur­nish him for the improvement or alteration of his [Page 250] system. This frankness, so nobly courted in an en­tire monarchical government, would in many a republic he thought a crime against the state; while, on the contrary, it has already produced such edicts at Versailles as must greatly conduce to the augment­ation of the power and consideration of France; if this system can be persevered in, and the attacks of self-interest, the most inimical motive that can exist to this kind of improvement, can be parried with skill and firmness.

All the faculties of the mind and of the heart rise into action under a wise monarch. In republics, a phlegmatic indifferent man is a good citizen, and such are held the best for the interest of the state: a man, whose talents are superior to those of the multitude, is dangerous; he would be a better citizen if he were more a fool; his actions and motives are narrowly pried into by suspicion as well as jealousy, and the noblest mind, therefore, often shrouds itself in obscurity and lives in a painful inactivity. But un­der the auspices of an intelligent monarch, [...] field is opened for the exercise of the powers of the mind; where talents run the race of emulation, and merit obtains the prize; where the character is stamp­ed with greatness; where genius unfolds itself; where wisdom and virtue break through the croud, and dare advance with unabashed countenances. Where virtue is honoured, there it resides. Riches [Page 251] are despised, when compared to the most insignificant trifles which are bestowed as pledges of the grati­tude and esteem of an enlightened monarch. He is the magnet which attracts the greatest talents and most elevated vi [...]tues, the hand that fashions them, the breath that animates them, and the centre of their activity. The most comprehensive faculties lie motionless and becalmed, [...] not called into action by the sovereign.

A monarch does not shine forth a conspicuous object to posterity, elevated as it were upon the shoulders of his people, if he leaves th [...] undis­tinguished beneath him. They together accend to the same height, with the only difference, that the prince stands at the head of a happy people, and the greatness of his name is written on every forehead. The glory of the monarch extends over his nation, and all those great men who, by their deserts participate in his glory, though they glitter likewise for themselves, yet their lustre is also re­reflected on the enlightened monarch who knew how to employ their talents. A king, therefore, who un­derstands the true art of government, concentrates the whole worth of his nation in himself, and his glory is inseparable from that of his people.

It has been observed, that the art of governing with honour requires but one talent, and but one virtue, respectively dependant on each other: this [Page 252] virtue is that of philanthropy, and the proper ap­plication of it is the talent required. When a king is seriously and heartily inclined to do good, and employs with scrupulous discernment the most in­fallible means in his power to accomplish this glori­ous purpose, the honour that arises to him from his efforts only returns to its own source. A king, who unites every part of his territories by the bands of confidence and love into one body, of which he is the soul, who encourages population and indus­try, who promotes agriculture and trade, who awakens and rewards the arts, who calls talents into action and gives protection to virtue: such a king accumulates in the [...] of peace an immense treasure of glory, without its costing his subjects a single tear, or the world when drop of blood; an harvest which is reaped by the hand which sowed it, and enjoyed by those who assist in col­lecting it.

This ever-existing intimate connection between the glory of a monarch and that of his subjects, is the chief foundation of noble pride in monarchical states; every subject appropriates to himself a part of the glory of his sovereign, and in the same man­ner, the sovereign is irradiated by that which his subjects acquire.

The spirit of rapine in a monarch cannot, it is true, induce any one of his subjects, who is in his [Page 253] right senses, to boast of it. The man who is in the service of his king and his country, may carry arms in a good or in a bad cause; he may have received the sword from the hand of justice, or from that of ambition; he cares not why or wherefore; he is neither looked to as the author, the justifyer, or the guarantee of the plan he carries into execution; his personal honour is secured to him, and he is the more respected in proportion to the energy with which he executes his duty. An extraordinary strength of mind, and talents of the first rate, may make him feel the misery which they occasion in the world, and may suppress the emotions of pride; but when the genius of war animates a royal breast, and far superior to the surprizing disclosure of natural powers, far superior to the effects of a spirit of con­tention, it is founded on justice, then every feeling mind exalts itself with the king, and is justly proud of a monarch who, broiling in the mid-day sun, and covered with dust and blood, performs wonders at the head of his subjects.

Of such a king, his subjects will with justice be proud; who has passed the days of his youth in soli­tude; who has shook hands with misfortune, in the years of pleasure; and in the season of tranquil en­joyment has learned to be a king, a philosopher, a legislator, a hero, and a man.

[Page 254]Under such a king, the genius of a nation will take a new flight; the arts and sciences will rise into just estimation; philosophy will no more be pedantry; and even courtiers will become philoso­phers, when the king despises that frivolousness which, among the great, constitutes what they call high life; and which is excusable in those shallow harmless kings, who, seated on the throne, are tired with doing nothing. Liberty of opinion will pre­sent an undaunted front; persecuted virtue will find an asylum; and oppressed innocence, a shield: the spirit of persecution will recoil through its own subterraneous passages to the dungeons of despair, and the injured will be revenged, when by an in­estimable piece of good fortune, philosophy, united to sovereign power, assists in chasing from the throne those vices which are destructive of the rights of man. Every path to fame will be open to the people, when the monarch treads each path before them; and no nobler incentive to literary exertions can exist, than when the royal pen flows with genius and wit; when the history it traces is truth, and the poetry it produces is pregnant with thought and spirit. Favourites will become sincere, and politicians honest, if he tears the mask of flattery from the face of falsehood, and that of policy from cunning. Innocence will never murmur against its judges, and justice and equity will cease bleeding at every pore, if the monarch shews his indignation [Page 255] against the spirit of litigation, and forces it back to the hell it came from; leaving its encouragers and protectors, the lawyers and their dependants, to get their bread by honest means or starve.

The subjects of such a king will cherish the most justifiable pride, when he extends his regard as well to the humblest among them as to his choicest friends; when he adopts every measure requisite to ensure the meanest peasant as much real happiness as the highest peer; when his presence fills the court with the awe of majesty, and the cottage of the labourer with cheerfulness and content.

The soul of such a monarch will animate his army; when in war, he shares with his soldiers the fatigues of a march, the inclemencies of the season, and the want of all conveniencies, and often of the necessaries of life; when he smiles with complacen­cy on their bands as they pass in review before him; when he mixes in the middle of them, cordially presses their rough hands, and inspires their souls with the same heroic hilarity he himself feels at the sight of them; when he goes into their tents and converses with ease and familiarity, gaily with the merry, tenderly with the unhappy; enquiring with sympathy after their wounds, and sharing the smart of them; striving to conquer the impatience of suffering, and supporting the heroism of their souls [Page 256] even in death; when within sight of the enemy, by a penetrating and quick glance of all that is necessary to the success of a comprehensive and well combined plan, he regulates the present by his ex­perience of the past; always can seize the fleeting, the decisive moment of advantage, and pressing for­ward at the head of his troops, carrying the banner of death before him, in the very heat of the battle, surrounded by innumerable and imminent dangers, and fighting in the thickest throngs of the enemy, can, with an unshaken presence of mind, observe at one glance both danger and deliverance.

The subjects of such a king will with joy, in the middle of numerous and impending perils, look forward to the day on which his glory will be firm­ly established; when they behold the most powerful and warlike nations, and who are the best appoint­ed to strive for the empire of the world, rise up against him; their country attacked on all sides, nearly over-run by its enemies, and shaken to its very foundations; their monarch long unacquainted with rest and ease, in order to procure these com­forts to his subjects, watching many a tedious night, while protected and secured by his plans and precautions, they lie in soft and undisturbed repose; when they see him, ever more sudden than danger, more vigilant than artifice, impetuous and irresist­ible as the whirlwind of heaven, flying with his suc­cour [Page 257] from one province to another, and delivering innocence from destruction and rapine, wherever they appear; when, by his unheard of exploits, he extorts admiration as well from his noble-minded enemies as from his most zealous friends, and at­tracts the eyes of the whole world; when he is quick, vigorous, eager and impressive, often making powerful and decisive exertions, sometimes striking short of his aim, sometimes receiving injury from the recoil of his blow; not following circumstances, but bending them to his purpose; not removing obstacles, but over-leaping them; and ever greatest where he has to redress a fault; when, vanquished, sometimes by nature, sometimes by numbers, sometimes by he­roes he has formed and taught to conquer, he ever knows how to pluck deliverance from danger, and re­demption from the brink of a precipice; when eve­ry misfortune is but the never failing forerunner of a great and surprising effort of courage and pru­dence; when his losses lead him to new victories, and resembling nothing but himself, great and unexam­pled both in prosperity and calamity, he now triumphs over his enemies, and now over his misfortunes.

Every patriotic soul will more than ever glow for him, when, over the widely extended graves of the victors and the vanquished, the wearied world shall re-echo with the joyful sound of peace, and the mo­narch, greater even than in war, shall on the festive [Page 258] day of his return to his royal city, steal away from the loud acclamations and heart-felt exultations and blessings of the multitude, to visit in solitude a neigh­bouring field of battle, and calling the adjacent pea­santry around him, shall enquire with solicitude and earnestness after their present situation, the num­ber of cattle they now have and the losses they have sustained by the operations of war; and alleviating, by every means in his power, the distresses they have undergone, shall at night, disdaining the offen­sive pomp of a triumphal entry, return to his palace by an unfrequented and unsuspected passage.

The noblest pride can thus exist in monarchies, when the sovereign and his administration are what they ought to be.

Chapter XVII. Reflections on some advantages and disadvantages of National Pride, as founded upon real Excellencies.

I AM aware that many pointed, sarcastical remarks, occurring in this treatise, will have called down upon my head the bitterest execrations of wounded pride, which will have invoked heaven and earth, fire and water, hell and the devil, and all their concomitants and dependants, to revenge its ideal wrong; and I must still humbly solicit my pardon, for the wholesome but galling truths which may now and then be found in this my last chapter.

An elevation of heart, reposing on a real and so­lid foundation, is certainly of great utility in some cases, and is even sanctioned and approved of by re­ligion. Although we cannot boast of our merits before God, yet religion inspiring us with the sense of the greatness of our destination, and the means by which it may be attained, exalts our whole soul; while Divine Providence and mercy infuse into us a [Page 260] steady confidence and renovated powers, to appre­ciate and depend upon our own exertions, never leaving us to sink under the weaknesses of human nature. Humility of heart can very well exist with perseverance, resolution, elevation of soul, and, in general, with every consequence of a cheerful con­sciousness of our good qualities and perfections; provided we never lose sight of our dependance on God, and the consideration that he is the mediate or immediate source of every good. A certain de­gree of self-satisfaction too often, indeed, appears through the veil of humility; but real humility does not require of us to deny the good we really possess, or to prize it at a lower rate than it in fact deserves; so that religion, far from condemn­ing a noble elevation of heart, is rather a stable foundation for it, since it does not require the know­ledge of ourselves, only for the purpose of subdu­ing our vain glory, but for that of making us sensi­ble of the faculties and advantages we have received from the Creator, and exciting us to employ them in a manner suitable to his glory and our own hap­piness.

A confidence in these faculties and advantages, and the firm belief in eternal truth and justice arising therefrom, produces a strength and con­stancy of soul which repels the ruling abuses and prejudices of a country; a courage to withstand an [Page 261] universal hatred, and out of respect for truth, to set at nought the opinions of the many.

This confidence in one's own resources begets that aspiring sentiment of superiority, without which a man cannot attempt any noble deed; de­prived of this confidence, the bravest man sinks into a state of dulness and inactivity, by which his soul is fettered and debased as in a narrow prison, where it should seem to be endowed with power only to endure, where the heavy load of calamity wholly presses down the heart, where every duty is a burden, the least labour dreaded, and every future prospect gloomy and cheerless. Every path to fame and honour is inaccessible to him, and his spirit lies motionless and dejected, like the hardy polar naviga­tor, who finds himself hemmed in and surrounded on every side by a vast continent of ice. He arrives at nothing, for he aspires to nothing; and he aspires not, because he is diffident of his faculties. For this reason, we often see people of much lower merit, the foremost in the road to fortune, only because their character is more enterprising and undaunted.

It is from this same degrading and too low opin­ion of ourselves, that one man becomes the slave of another. I see, with heartfelt sorrow, men of merit fall into the extremest self-contempt, with regard to great men, on whom, perhaps, sometimes their for­tune [Page 262] depends; but who do not even require this abasement.

I have often heard a language held which is called humility, but is in fact, abjectness of mind; which, for the sake of a livelihood hardly earned, or for an ill-requited service, sets a great man in the place of a deity, and would only be worthy of an Algerine slave, crouching before his Dey. Such language penetrates my very soul, as it debases human nature itself; besides, more true respect is ever shewn to greatness, when we speak our senti­ments freely and nobly. Whoever falls into the fault, either in reality or in appearance, to esteem himself less than he ought to do, becomes the slave of every one who chuses to make him so. The fear of losing his daily bread deprives his soul of all its energy, swells every guinea to a mountain's size, and stamps every expression with the character of the most cringing servitude, unless a man be unconquerably attached to his native liberty. With those who are so miserably dependant on the smiles of the great for temporary sustenance, the opinion of their own meanness swallows up all ideas of the innate dignity of human nature, of nobility of sentiment, of self-confidence, and of their competence to judge for themselves concerning what is right or wrong; they, at last, in reality, turn the heads of those otherwise good natured nobles, by ever crouching before [Page 263] them as before the throne of a tyrant, and by look­ing up to them with the same fearful and sorrow­ful countenance as a friar does to his abbot under whose tremendous censure he has fallen.

From this same too humiliating opinion of them­selves, men become the slaves of their passions and unfaithful to the purposes of their creation. More confidence in their own powers would prove to them, that it is possible to be virtuous amidst temptation, and that they may rise from the fascina­ting couch of luxury and pleasure triumphant over both. Were the Ascetics endowed with this con­fidence, they need not use such exertions to destroy the match at which love takes fire.

We become unfaithful to the purposes of our creation when we do not possess those solid prin­ciples which hardens us against suffering. Every man of understanding is of no use to society, if, in a joyless retirement of the world, he has not learned to bear with all that can wound the finer sentiments, dissipate or oppose the softness of hu­manity, and pierce the tenderness of heart arising from it. He ceases to exert his faculties, when he daily sees people around him, who do not know that their understanding and taste may be improved and sharpened, by a thousand things whose names they are even ignorant of; and, who of course [Page 264] heartily hate the commanding influence of under­standing and taste. He snatches at momentary joys, and unnerves all the powers of his soul, to be admitted into their society. He opposes the opi­nions of no man, let them be ever so absurd. He pretends not to correct any prejudice or error, de­termined, as Tristram Shandy very justly says to his mule, "never to argue a point with any one of that family as long as he lives."

Except within the ever-cheering bounds of re­ligion, it is impossible to find a more powerful sup­port under misfortune than in a reasonable self-esteem. Let a worthy man, when persecuted and disgraced, only ask himself, who are they who are always planning my destruction, who openly despise me, abuse, calumniate, and scoff at me? Are they not, to a man, fools and blockheads? and such peo­ple can be as little friends to enlightened minds, as thieves are to honesty: hence it is an honour to be an object of their abuse. Every man of sense should adhere to these sentiments; he should be conscious that he is above meddling with this insect tribe. But if he has repelled their attacks, and sees that slander now only dares whisper its malice, and dart its venom behind his back, he will smile at its vain efforts, and think these people are heavily loaden with spite, and must discharge it at all events, or sink under it.

[Page 265]A reliance on good fortune, or that extraordinary concurrence of events we do not foresee, supports a man in imminent danger, elevates his soul, and lessens that dread which he otherwise would feel in his mind, when about to execute some great atchieve­ment, he sees and weighs the difficulties and dangers he has to encounter. This reliance on his good fortune produced that noble presumption which Caesar, when yet but young, shewed during his imprisionment in the island of Pharmacusa among the pirates of Cilicia; who were then, by reason of their large ships, and numerous fleets, masters of the sea, and, at the same time, men of the most sanguinary character. Caesar sent all his attendants to the adjacent towns to collect money for his ransom, and stayed accompanied only by his physician and two servants, with these barbarians, whom he treated with great contempt; often, when he went to rest, he ordered them to be silent, and not to disturb his sleep. The Cilicians required twenty talents for his ransom, and Caesar laughing at them, as if they did not know what a valuable prisoner they had, promised them fifty: he con­tinued perfectly easy and intrepid for near six weeks, jesting and diverting himself with these rude outlaws; he composed discourses and poems, which he read to them, and called such as were not affected by them, barbarians and ideots: he went so far, as often to assure them, with a laugh­ing [Page 266] countenance, that he would have them all hanged; and, in fact, he had hardly regained his freedom, before, taking some ships which he found in the hardour of Melitum, he directly attacked these pirates close to Pharmacusa, took the greatest part of them prisioners, and condemned them to be crucified. This same reliance on his good fortune caused in this same Caesar the memorable instance of intrepidity he shewed a few days before the bat­tle of Pharsalia; when, disguised in the habit of a slave, he went in a little bark to meet the fleet of Anthony, which was not come up: a violent tem­pest arose, and threatned immediately to over­whelm them in the waves, when Caesar, taking the trembling and desponding pilot by the hand, said, "Courage man! you carry Caesar and his for­tunes." Columbus conjectured that a new world might be discovered, and persevering in his good fortune he discovered America.

One man thinks himself born to misfortune, another to happiness; just as a gamester plays very badly the remainder of an evening, because he had begun by playing unluckily: the first, always deter­red by fear and irresolution, never risks any thing, and will, therefore, certainly always remain in poverty, and at the same time his irresolution will make him an object of contempt and pity to others. The latter is fortunate, because he ventures as [Page 267] much as may be without temerity, and a bright day-break of good fortune immediately kindles in his breast a higher degree of hope, which we call confidence, and procures him the esteem and re­spect of others. Confidence in one's self pro­duces the power even of resisting time; an emu­lation of one's self, to surpass, by new deeds, our former one's, and to eclipse, by greater merits, those which are already acknowledged to belong to us; persevering in our career of fortune, till we over­take the fickle goddess. But the greatest minds are those who, convinced of the vicissitudes of human affairs, are never over-bearing in prosperity, nor cast down in adversity.

Hence it appears, that a noble self-esteem actually gives us the power to exalt ourselves above the weakness of human nature, to exert our talents in praise-worthy enterprises, never to yield to the spirit of slavery, never to be slaves of vice, to obey the dictates of our conscience, to smile under mis­fortune, and to rely upon seeing better days.

It is of infinite consequence that this exaltation of human nature, this confidence in our powers, should be imprinted in the bosom in the earliest period of life. Young minds must be animated with the love of what is good, noble, and great: virtue must be depicted to them in striking ex­amples [Page 268] to make them love virtue; we must inspire them with a high opinion of their faculties, that they may venture to become virtuous and good; always teach them by representation, impress them with the value of great deeds, by speaking pictures, and encourage them to imitate what they see exhibted by sensible objects. Lavater's national songs, and Solomon Hirzel's historical views of the Swiss con­federacy, are put into the hands of our Helvetian youth; these present them with a picture of those times, when nobleness of soul was prised above every thing; when virtuous manners found univer­sal esteem, and heroic virtues, universal renown. In youth, we are capable of catching that bright flame which glowed in the heroes of former times, and of indulging the noble wish of gathering laurels in the very places where our worthy ancestors reaped a glorious harvest of them. The representation of noble atchievements, and the history of virtuous actions, have an electrical effect upon the pliant stem of youth; they inspire the soul with admira­tion, and render the young men emulous of these examples.

Great historical events, expressively delineated and conveyed to the heart in glowing colours, the lives of famous men, such as those by Plutarch, and Casper Hirzel, and the poems of Gesner, imprinted with the noble and indelible marks of [Page 269] nature, have, therefore, astonishing effects on the minds of youth. I heard my son once, in his fifth year, ask his mother, who pressed him to her mater­nal bosom, while she explained to him Plutarch's lives, "Will my life, too, be written?" Every child, nobly born, however poor his parents may be, will desire to be great; when his heart is completely touched with the genius or virtues of great men, the same virtues will germinate in his young mind, and he will burn with impatience to fill, with regard to posterity, the same post of honour which those eminent men have filled before him with such dis­tinguished splendour. This desire of emulation will frequently burst into tears, which every father ought to reward by the fondest embraces.

Themistocles was very young when the Greeks vanquished the Persians at Marathon, and hearing Miltiades, to whom they owed that victory con­tinually extolled, he became quite silent and pen­sive, and avoided all juvenile diversions; his friends asked him the reason of this change, and this noble youth answered, "the trophies of Miltiades will not let me sleep." Thucydides, the historian, burst into tears when he heard, in his early youth, Hero­dotus publicly read his history, amidst the univer­sal applause of all Greece, in the city of Olympia. Zeno exhorted those who looked upon the serious and contemplative countenance of Pericles, as a [Page 270] proof of his insufferable arrogance, to be animated with the same pride, in order to be inflamed with the same love of the great and good, and that they might be insensibly accustomed to the imitation of his virtues. Demosthenes was, when a boy, so struck with the renown which Callistrates acquired by pleading, that, captivated by the sublime power of eloquence, he immediately embraced the princi­ples of Zeno, and retired into solitude, abandoning every other study for that of rhetoric, to which he entirely devoted himself. Homer was the author of much heroism among the Greeks, as well as the father of poetry; it is well known how eagerly Alexander read his sublime productions. When Caesar was reading the history of that conqueror, during his residence in Spain, he shed tears, be­cause Alexander was at the same age so great, and Caesar yet so insignificant; not indeed, virtuous tears, but those of ambition, which was the ruling passion of this future destroyer of Roman liberty; as plain­ly appeared, when in passing through a paltry in­significant village, he said, "I would rather be the first man here, than the second in Rome."

These impressions on the minds of youth, con­stantly repeated, strengthen the soul, multiply its springs, make every thing seem attainable to them, and strongly excite that noble desire of fame which always is productive of great actions when it is ac­companied [Page 271] by virtue; while, on the other hand, an utter insensibility towards the instances of nobleness of soul or superior merit, which we meet with in his­tory, is the surest presage that the youth on whom they make no impression, will never be capable of any thing great. The Spartans understood per­fectly how to raise in their children this noble thirst of honour; a reproach was the most poignant punishment they could inflict; and a commendation was a rapturous reward; whoever shewed himself indifferent and unmoved by either the one or the other, was despised at Sparta as a mean, little mind, unadapted to the exercise of any virtue. It is on this principle that, very lately, a French minister of state, the Duke of Choiseul, has commanded a man of learning, who possesses the feelings of a citizen, and the penetration of a statesman, to make a col­lection of the fine sayings and actions of French officers and soldiers, for the use of the military school at Paris; and certainly this will be the best book that can be put into the hands of a young French soldier.

All these reflections, taken collectively, lead to the conclusion of the great consequence to a nation, of a noble self-esteem, and of the important advan­tage resulting from it, owing to the close con­nection between a proper national pride, and the love of one's country.

[Page 272]When the example of one single man taken out of a whole series of historical relations, is suf­ficient to animate our hearts with such noble senti­ments, how much more must the accumulated ex­amples of whole nations work upon our minds? Great actions, in war or in the internal government of a commonwealth, fill our bosoms with admira­tion of them and of our country, penetrating us with the inmost veneration for those men who were sensible of the pleasure of dying for their country; who did not withdraw from serving it, though their expectations were defeated, though their disgust was ever so much awakened, their feelings hurt, and their whole lives embittered by the sharpest stings of envy and malice, which they magnanimously bore for the honour of virtue and of their country's rights. It is for such men, that the reverence of a nation must be excited, in order to beget in it a due respect for itself, which alone is able to render it celebrated.

The pride arising from the merits of such men gives a nation a just claim to immortality, when these great examples descending to posterity, un­adulterated by tradition, are admired and emulated. Hence came that great and noble energy of soul and thought, with which the whole nation was animated, both among the Grecians and the Ro­mans. The love of their country was interwoven [Page 273] in their religion, in their constitution, and in their manners; "Their Country" was the soul of socie­ty, the universal topic of conversation, the word of battle, the sound to rally by, the shout of victory in their bloody wars; it was the music that charmed them in private life, the sinew of their actions; it inflamed their poets, their orators, and their sena­tors; it resounded from the stage, in the forum, in all their public assemblies: it was brought home to the inmost souls of their posterity, by the public monuments erected to its honour. But in modern times, we often see whole nations devoid of this vivifying sentiment; the love of their country has been transferred to the inhabitants of more than one monarchy, and in more than one republic it seems to be considered as an improper prejudice.

While whole nations placed their honour in liberty, and this in nothing but a noble manner of thinking, the love of their country was the dearest sentiment of their souls. Stronger than self-love, full of softness, loveliness, and harmony; the love of their country included all that could touch the heart and elevate the soul; it deprived death of its sting and luxury of its votaries: the generous flame burned in every bosom, every heart glowed for its country. Hardened to suffering, insensible to their own inconvenience, and proportionably more zea­lous for the happiness of all, they were desirous of [Page 274] nothing but what might tend to serve their country; preferring even its honour to that of their own in­dividual progenitors and the general good to pri­vate advantage; they thought themselves sufficiently happy and honoured, if the republic was happy and honoured. They laid aside their private animosities and jealousies, and laboured to promote the glory and interest of their greatest competitors, when the public good seemed to require it. If injured by their country, they readily forgot its poignant in­gratitude, and served it even while smarting under its sting; they submitted to its caprices, as a dutiful child submits to the splenetic humour of its parent. Under every kind of hardships they remained steadily and warmly attached to their country, and endea­voured to conceal their own sufferings from them­selves, by fixing all their attention upon the public welfare. They broke asunder, before the altar of their country, the bands of affection, love, and tenderness, towards parents, children, wives, and relations; they tore themselves away from every thing that could keep them back in effeminate in­dolence; they were deaf to the voice of relation­ship and love, and only listened to that of their country; they heard in the most fearful sounds of war and arms, nothing but the thanks of their country on their return; they never enquired after the number of their enemies, but where they were. Each advanced with intrepidity to the post of [Page 275] honour, which perhaps had been the grave of his gallant ancestors at some former period; each pressed forward to assist in forming a rampart for their defenceless fellow citizens, contented if, by his fall, he could give occasion to another to advance to the same glorious death on the same spot; for, it was not the slain who lamented, but those who in­gloriously survived.

Hipperides, the orator, bit his own tongue off when on the rack, in order to prevent the greatness of the torture, in which he died, from forcing him to betray his country to Antipater.

Pedarates had not the good fortune to be chosen among the three hundred men who enjoyed in Sparta a distinguished rank: and he went home perfectly contented, saying, "I am uncommonly happy that Sparta possesses three hundred men of greater merit than myself."

Before the battle of Marathon, the Athenians elected ten generals, who were invested each in his turn, with the supreme command. The day ap­proaching when it belonged to Aristides to assume it, he generously yielded his authority to the ap­proved valour and experience of Miltiades. The other generals followed the illustrious example, sacrificing the dilates of private ambition to the [Page 276] interest and glory of their country; and the com­mander in chief thus enjoyed an opportunity of exerting, uncontrolled, the utmost vigour of his genius.

Cimon, whan banished by the Ostracism from Athens, joined the army of the Athenians when they were about joining battle with the Lacede­monians, who had always been his friends, and with whom he was accused of carrying on a secret and traiterous correspondence. But his enemies of the popular faction procured an order of the council, forbidding him to be present at the battle; he retired accordingly, but conjured his friends, who were likewise suspected of favouring the ene­my, to prove his and their innocence by deeds; and they, placing Cimon's armour in the middle of their little battalion, fought and died in his stead for their country.

The oath which every young Athenian was obliged to take, on the completion of his twentieth year, when he was admitted among the number of citizens, was in the following form: "I will never disgrace myself in war; I will never seek to save my life, by an ignominious flight; I will fight for my country to the last drop of my blood, in the ranks of my fellow citizens, or alone if circum­stances requires it; I will devote all the days of my [Page 277] life to the service of my country; and Agraules, Mars, and Jupiter bear witness of my sincerity."

Thrasybulus, who, after the Peloponesian war, delivered his country from the power of the thirty tyrants, animated his fellow citizens and fellow soldiers with these words: "Let us fight like men, who can only by victory recover our properties, our families, and our country; let every individual among us conduct himself in such a manner as, without presumption, to think he owes those great advantages, together with the honour of victory, to his own arm and his own courage: he that outlives this day, and sees old age; he that can behold the completion of his renown and his deliverance, will be happy; but he who shall be liberated from his bands by death, will be no less happy, for no monu­ment is so glorious as the memorial of having died for one's country."

The Lacedemonians were often unfortunate in their second war with the Messenians: the courage of this warlike people began to sink, and the repub­lic thought itself near destruction. The Delphian oracle proposed the humiliating expedient to the Lacedemonians, to request a man from the Athe­nians to assist them in this dangerous crisis, and who might support them by his counsel and talents. Athens sent them, in derision, the poet Tyrteus: [Page 278] the Lacedemonians, however, received him as the sacred messenger of the divinity; yet they were again defeated three times successively, and pre­pared to return to Sparta. Tyrteus opposed this dishonourable determination with all his power, and laboured incessantly by his songs, filled with the most ardent glow of patriotism, to rekindle the depressed courage of the Spartan troops; he soon succeeded in regenerating in every heart the love of its country and the contempt of death; their valour resumed its activity; they attacked the victorious Messenians with an enthusiastic prowess, and were victorious in their turn.

Epaminondas lay stretched on the ground, and mortally wounded in the breast by a spear; but he was only uneasy for the fate of his arms and the event of the battle. As soon as his shield was shewn him, and he was assured that the Thebans had gained the victory, he turned himself with a quiet and cheerful countenance to the by-standers, and said, "My friends do not look on this day as the last of my life, but as the first of my happiness and of the completion of my glory; I leave my country victorious, the proud Spartans humbled, and Greece emancipated from servitude;" then drawing the steel out of his wound, he expired without a groan.

[Page 279]After the unfortunate battle of Leuctra, the Spar­tan mothers, whose sons had died on the field of bat­tle, joyfully went to the temple, crowned with gar­lands of flowers, to thank the gods for having given them such noble children; while, on the contrary, those mothers whose sons had saved themselves by flight, concealed themselves in the inmost recesses of their houses, deeply sunk in grief, and keeping a death-like silence; being ashamed to have borne children who fled from their enemies.

The Spartan matron, who was told the death of her son in the service of his country, nobly and stoi­cally replied, "It was for that end he was born."

"O traveller, inform the Lacedemonians, that we lie here, pursuant to the laws of our country," was the truly laconic epitaph of those who fell at the battle of Thermopylae.

For liberty and their country, those watch-words of every people not yet in chains, the Privernates maintained a long and obstinate war against the Romans; they were at length so weakened, that, forced to fly on all sides, they were at last obliged to shut themselves up in their city, which was besieged and taken by the consul Plautius. As this was the second revolt of the Privernates from the dominion of Rome, they were deemed [Page 280] worthy of exemplary punishment; but Plautius in­terceded with the senate for the innocent multitude, and particularly for the prisoners taken in the war, whom he brought to the door of the senate-house; he did not, however, immediately draw the con­script fathers over to his sentiments: they were divided in opinion. One of the Privernates, by an haughty answer, endangered all his fellow-captives. Being asked by a senator, "What punishment he thought the Privernates deserved?"—"The same," said he, "which is due to men, who think them­selves worthy of liberty, and who persevere in every possible measure to preserve it." So daring an answer exasperated some of the assembly; which Plautius perceiving, endeavoured to prevent the ill effects of it, by putting a milder question to the prisoner, and which would naturally draw a softer answer from him: "Suppose," said the consul, "we should grant you pardon and peace; in what manner may we expect you will behave yourselves for the future?" The prisoner answered, "if the conditions of the peace you may impose on us are just and humane, and if we need not blush to have accepted them, we shall maintain it faith­fully and inviolably; and if it be a disgraceful peace, you must not hope that the necessity which to-day compells us to subscribe to it, will to-morrow oblige us to observe it." These words made dif­ferent impressions upon the judges; some construed [Page 281] them as menaces, and an indication of a disposition to a new revolt; but the greater and wiser part ap­plauded the magnanimity of the sentiments they expressed. Those especially of the senators, who had filled the curule chair, adhered to the opinion of Plautius, who loudly declared, and repeated it often, "that a people, whose only desire was li­berty, and whose only fear was that of losing it, were worthy to be made Roman citizens." Accord­ingly, the senate passed a decree in favour of the prisoners, and Privernum became a Municipium.

Examples of this nature shine in history as pat­terns to posterity. They awaken in every noble mind an irrefragable sense of the duties we owe to our country; and the preservation of the history of these examples is nothing more than the propa­gation of that national pride founded on real ad­vantages.

By the propagation, therefore, of a laudable national pride, the love of its country is introduced into every heart. All breasts are accessible to this pride, and they are all hurried away by the magic of these examples, to the invincible attachment it generates. The continual retrospect of former times, and the continual contemplation of futurity, are reciprocally the causes and effects of this pride, and of this love. An honest patriot will sooner [Page 282] die than commit any deed for which his children must blush when he is laid in his grave; while nothing seems more noble or sublime to him than the thought that his posterity will rejoice in his vir­tues and be respected on his account.

When, therefore, by the revival of these senti­ments the principles and maxims of a nation take a new turn, the actions of its citizens will likewise be ennobled and will rise to the level of their ac­quired sensations. The man who hopes to attain any post of honour in the commonwealth, without daring to think on any subject with manliness, freedom, liberality, and penetration, will, instead of succeeding in his views, be an object of derision and contempt. Integrity will ever keep in mind the public welfare, and contribute its utmost to the pro­motion of it, notwithstanding mean and little minds may call it improvidence and indiscretion, whose views are directed wholly towards the benefit of their families. Inequality of condition will lose its vexatious nature, when there exists but one politi­cal virtue, and when all are united under the noble appellation of citizen. The attachment to their country will no longer depend merely upon the uncertainty of greater happiness in another [...] will willingly live content with the [...] necessaries, rather than quit their country in pursuit of the luxu­ries of other climes. Every [...] obey his superior [Page 283] more from inclination than duty, more from af­fection than obligation. The government will no more be the soul of many bodies, but rather the soul of one body.

These advantages will be more discernible when I consider them in another point of view, and prove how very impatient the cultivation of a noble pride is to a nation palsied by the decay of its virtue.

The noble pride of a nation is diminished or an­nihilated when the advantages gained by the virtues of their fathers are lost through the vices of their descendants. Times are altered, is a common say­ing, and the conclusion to be formed from it is neither difficult nor subtle. Times, to be sure, would be much altered, with regard to a nation who depended on muscular strength of body, if they were to be collected to fight but one battle now the art of slaughter is brought to such per­fection; yet no one doubts the indispensable necessity of the modern art of war. But it is not only the knowledge of the management of arms that is necessary to a free-born nation; it must likewise have an intellectual knowledge, and be endowed with principles and sentiments, and these are not instilled by the blows of a cane or the sound of a drum.

[Page 284]In this respect, the change of times makes the resumption of ancient maxims but too needful. Though courage and zeal in the service of the state are very often out of fashion, yet they are never useless, always denoting vigor. When, therefore a nation seems to loose its spirit, because its soil is no more dyed with the blood of its sons; when the noble flame, formerly kindled by the love of liberty, is smothered by an almost universal lethargy; when indolence is chosen for the last intrenchment; when nursed in luxury and terror, the mind looses the whole of its pith and strength; when enormous expences make avarice and the thirst of gold a necessary evil; when cowardice raises into con­sideration, and valour depresses into misfortune; when men, not thinking they stand any more in need of prowess, fall into every kind of profligacy; when even the crimes which require a certain strength and elevation of mind are not to be met with, when selfishness is no more thought a vice, and the timid prudence of a moment no more a fault in politics; when ambition, instead of en­deavouring to excel its rivals, seeks only to blacken them by calumny: then, I say, the revival of na­tional pride would be a measure of no little efficacy to rekindle the fire of ancient virtue, and repro­duce the powers of youth and manhood in the de­cay of age, when the nation seems to be near the last struggles of dissolution.

[Page 285]All expectation of the revival of a noble pride, however, seems to be vain, when, in a free nation, there are too many people in whose eyes Phocion was a fool; too many who look down upon a hero with a haughty pity; who do not believe that there ever existed any great men; who think fame an empty bubble, because it has always proved im­possible for them to do any thing worthy of it; who contract their brows into the appearance of a frown, which visibly betrays their timorous emo­tions, when the word freedom is pronounced by an adventurous innovator in their presence; who would exclude from the press the most sublime monuments of the honour of their formerly sim­ple and unsophisticated nation, in which the heroic deeds of their fathers are depicted in the most lively colours, by which the love of virtue, of concord, of liberty, of religion, of their country, and of the laws would, like a stream of fire, rush into every heart, and awaken in it at the same time an utter aversion to the poison of foreign manners, to prodigality, to effeminacy, and to avarice; ad­ducing in their support, this shameful and pitiful maxim, "That it is dangerous to pull down an old house over your shoulders."

Thomas Abbt, a man of real genius, whom I cannot name without expressing my reverence for his memory, says very pertinently, that the exam­ples [Page 286] of patriots appear with such lustre in the annals of republics, since it is their interest to procure the rewards due to their greatest worthies from posteri­ty, because their cotemporaries were too poor to afford them. The duties of remembrance, of gra­titude, and of emulation, are, therefore, imposed on us with respect to our ancestors, and we can never fulfil these, if we look with indifference on what is great and good in their manners and actions; if we turn away our eyes in disgust from their con­templation, without deigning to be proud of them. It was only the memory of their great men, that preserved among the Greeks the thirst of honour, disinterestedness, and devotion to the public good.

The fate of this so necessary national pride de­pends upon that of the love of one's country. There are many accidental occurrences by which this last is sometimes carried to a genial warmth, whence the state receives the most excellent fruits; some­times to an immoderate heat, which entirely parches it up; sometimes, in a people no longer susceptible of the love of liberty, it will be so much refri­gerated that its fruits cannot ripen. The chilling hand of death stretched its baleful influence over the liberty of the Athenians, when, in the days of their lethargy and weakness, they erected altars to the honour of the harlots of Demetrius, and de­creed, by a public edict, that all the commands of [Page 287] king Demetrius should at Athens, be held sacred before the gods, and just before men.

But emergencies sometimes arise, when the man who thought to plough his field in quietness and ease, must grasp a sword instead of his instruments of husbandry; when we are no more to confine our thoughts and cares to what regards ourselves; when bullies, coxcombs, and idlers are called to other business, than to loiter about from one com­pany of females to another, boasting of their amours, their inconstancies, and their idle pursuits; when those, who know only how to command, must learn to obey; when it is not thought a misfortune to have fellow citizens of genius and talents; when we wish to hear the words liberty and my country repeated with ar­dour by every mouth; when those are no more declaimed against as ridiculous enthusiasts who, in callous times, have incessantly reminded their nation of its pristine glory, of the time when its inhabitants were poor, virtuous, bold, and free; when fields were cultivated by the victorious hands of the defenders of their country, and their plough-shares encircled with laurels. There are times, I say, when those, whom nature has gifted with energy and elevation of soul, and minds capable of the sublimest virtues, are no longer watched as sus­pected and dangerous subjects; when those who, [Page 288] in the career of youth, for the want of apprehen­sions and timidity, miscalled moderation and pru­dence, which are too often the consequence of experience, and have perhaps been impelled by an ardent principle of patriotic virtue beyond the bounds of real prudence; who have awakened the fear of their fellow-citizens, when they thought they beheld impending or distant dangers threaten their country; and who have wanted only an oc­casion to shed their willing blood in its behalf; are esteemed truly patriots; when the empty applause of a few titled fools will not be procured at the expence of turning into ridicule the noble enthu­siasm and virtuous principles of a whole nation; when hosts of foreign enemies assail it on all sides, whose attack seems to threaten inevitable ruin.

A nation will therefore never loose its honour as long as virtue remains unpolluted, and its virtue will never be tainted, as long as patriotism gives a free and lofty flight to every sentiment of the heart.

Finally, national pride, founded on real ad­vantages, has likewise its defective side. A cele­brated northern philosopher has made this import­ant remark, verified by daily experience, "That there are never any laudable sentiments, any glorious talents or faculties in human nature, which do not [Page 289] at the same time, by infinite gradation, degenerate into the very opposite imperfections." Hence, it is evident, that the extremes of reasonable and ridicu­lous pride often naturally run into each other.

The defects of great minds flow from their pride, when this degenerates into vanity. Dazzled by the flattery of their admirers, these demi-gods shut their ears as much to truth as the weakest princes; in­toxicated with the sense of their real advantages, they do not comprehend that these are not every where current for them. Whoever always seeks applause, will always be liable to meet with morti­fication in the extreme, and, in fact, will seldom escape it. He will, at last, nearly look upon him­self as the only being of consequence in the world, and all its other inhabitants either as his admirers or his enviers; but one of the ancients says ex­ceedingly well: "If thou wilt not be just and righteous without the ostentation of thy justice and righteousness, thou wilt often be so with shame and derision." The secret of the most subtle vanity is, on the other hand, nothing else than the art of making one's self prized, without either appearing to be vain or self-conceited. Cicero was ignorant of this art, or he would not have attracted the hatred of the Romans as he did, by the ever-recurring praise of himself and his actions; it was the text of all his orations, and never failed to [Page 290] offend his hearers, because he seemed to esteem his services every thing, and those of other men as nothing.

Pride is always misplaced when it cannot com­mand respect. It is very evident, that a man who is constantly and habitually proud, cannot possibly be so, on account of real advantages, since he dis­gusts all mankind by his pride, makes himself des­picable and ridiculous in every respect, and blinks through the spectacles of self-conceit, until all around him are exasperated to hatred and to goading sarcasm; and the contempt which is thus returned is generally much stronger than that occasioning it. Astonished at his superiority over the rest of the world, such a man endeavours to impress others with the same respect he entertaias for himself, and of which he is so full; he accustoms himself to awe freeborn men beneath his frowns, in the persons of his grooms and footmen; he thinks that all be­neath him, all on a level with him, nay his acknow­ledged superiors, may be called the populace; but an author, the best acquainted with man, the comic writer Sterne, says, "In sober truth, 'tis but a scurvy kind of a trick, (quoties voluit fortuna jocari,) when fortune, in one of her merry moods, takes a poor devil, with this passion in his head, and mounts him up at once as high as she can get him, for it is sure to make him play such fantastic [Page 291] tricks as to become the very fool of the comedy; and was he not a general benefactor to mankind in making it merry, I know not how spleen could be pacified during the representation."

Nothing upon earth is perfect; virtue even has its vulnerable points, the sun its spots, and a con­scientious prude, who has passed the ordeal of grace, may fall. We must not always judge of men who are thought great, by their writings or their words, we must also view their every action; we must study them in their lives, in their families, and in their houses; if we would rightly know them. The old and rigid Cato had a concubine as well as the philosophical emperor Marcus Antonius, and many a modern philosopher whom I know. The greatest men are always connected with the rest of mankind by some foible or other; and yet there are few of them who are so candid as Antigonus, who, on Hermodotus saluting him as a deity and the child of the sun, told him very judiciously "to ask the servant who emptied his close-stool his opinion upon this subject."

The greatest talents assume a hateful appearance, when they are accompanied by arrogance or break out in contempt of others. Contempt in an arro­gant man consists in the affection with which he shews, without reserve, his sense of the real or [Page 292] imaginary inferiority of another. Contempt in a proud man consists in the sense of the real inferiority of another, which he exposes when it ought to be ex­posed, and conceals where it ought to be concealed. This sense is inseparable from the noblest minds, and is ever just in itself, for it is impossible that any one can mistake a cat for an elephant, or a gnat for a mountain, but it is exceedingly offensive when it discovers defects where they ought not to be observed.

A well founded and noble self-esteem degenerates sometimes into temerity and presumption. Fana­ticism is called a devout presumption, which by an excess of pride and self-confidence, left to itself, pre­tends to approach the divine nature, and to exalt itself by an astonishing flight above the usual and prescribed order of things. It is greatly to be re­gretted, that sometimes the moral writers, as they are called, abandon themselves to the giddy pre­sumption, when they do not sufficiently weigh against each other our duties and our means of discharging them; when, in their reveries, they do not recollect that they desire impossibilities, and that they rob virtue of its charms, by substituting their rhapsodies and chimaeras in the place of vir­tue, while they endeavour to deceive the public into an acquiescence with their eccentric ideas.

[Page 293]The well-founded pride of whole nations, like­wise, has its blind side. No nation can be with justice unboundedly proud; great virtues are ac­companied with great faults, every good with its attendant evils, and every advantage with its incon­veniences. It is no crime to expose this fact to a nation with rational sincerity. My dear friend, Mr. Iselin, who well deserves attention, says, in the preface to his beautiful but very short History of Helvetian Virtue, "That every nation should pro­mise a reward to those who shall display, in the most obvious light, the defects of its Constitution and manners, and the vices and faults of its proge­nitors, as well as their virtues."

People are often also proud of advantages, which though real, they do not owe to themselves. The warmth or temperateness of a climate, the density or rarefaction of the air, the nature of the soil, of the water and the winds, together with the manner of living, and the customs, have all such a visible influence upon the faculties of whole nations, that they ought not to ascribe them solely to their own individual exertions. A worthy man may be proud of his virtues, for they are his own, but why should we pride ourselves upon our understanding, when the finest intellects are liable to be deranged by the most trivial physical accidents. Independant of ex­ternal circumstances; a little extraneous air in the [Page 294] bowels, or an indigestible lump in the stomach, and lo, the divine light of the soul is extinguished!

We but too seldom calculate how little of our own honour really belongs to ourselves. There are few men so honest as Antiochus Soter, who wept for spite on account of his victory over the Gala­tians, conceiving that he was not indebted for it to his own prowess or conduct, but to the dreadful havoc made by his elephants, and he, for that rea­son, caused trophies to be erected on the field of battle not dedicated to himself but to these power­ful four-footed auxiliaries.

Yet there are many detestable vices which arise from a national pride not altogether ignoble. The Canadian savage is extremely proud; he feels the full worth of freedom, and is impatient of controul, even in his infancy; restless under the least con­straint of education, he refuses to submit even to parental authority; but a generous forgiveness of offences is wholly unknown to him as a virtue; he despises it as a miserable weakness: intrepidity is his greatest merit, and the enjoyment of revenge his sweetest luxury.

The love of our country, too, requires sometimes a curb as well as a spur. It has been very shrewdly remarked, that the law-givers of ancient republics [Page 295] have sought more eagerly to inspire the people with this noble sentiment, and to extend and strengthen it in their hearts, than to set the bounds which rea­son prescribes so as to render them perceptible to the multitude, and to make them comprehend why it is necessary that the love of their country ought to be circumscribed and governed by reason.

In their most exalted days, the Greeks held the love of their country as the first civil virtue. We certainly owe a higher degree of that affection we ought to bear towards all mankind, to our parents, our wives, and our children, than to strangers; and a greater measure of the good will, which human na­ture in general requires at our hands, to our own country, which is the proper seat of our activity, the station appointed to us by Providence for the exer­cise of every social duty. But this limitation, this contraction of our philanthropy, often makes us narrow-minded, selfish, and unjust, nay, sometimes iniquitously barbarous towards all other nations. As the love of mankind, like that of beauty, seldom can be made to attach so forcibly to the absent, as to those who are present, so we always esteem the Europeans more than the Africans, the Asiatics, or the Americans, our own countrymen more than foreigners, and our fellow-citizens more than our fellow-subjects; but by thus gradually receding from universal philanthropy, we are insensibly led [Page 296] to hate all that is not immediately connected with us by the bands of interest or consanguinity, and sometimes even snap these asunder: a convincing proof of a misanthropic disposition not unfrequent in human nature. I know an European city, the government whereof possesses an extensive and beautiful tract of land, which is happy under its sway; but, unfortunately, the exclusive predilec­tion in favour of their fellow-citizens is so violent a passion in all the weak heads of this city, that they deprive the inhabitants of all the towns in their territory of emulation, excluding them from the enjoyment of all rewards or marks of honour, and in the fits of their madness, would willingly drown them all if it was in their power.

The more we cleave to the particular and indi­vidual interest of our own country, the less philan­thropic we most assuredly become. Such patriots act in general most repugnantly towards foreigners, because they are so, and of course are nothing in their estimation. The Jews of the old testament, were so much attached to their country, that they neglected the duties of humanity towards strangers. The Greeks despised all foreigners as barbarians, and thought them destined to be their slaves, be­cause nature had given them less genius and under­standing. The virtuous Spartans were unjust and fraudulent towards strangers. A Japanese, who [Page 297] should chance to shew the least esteem or friendship for a Dutchman, would be pointed at as an enemy of his country, since he was not attached to it in ex­clusion of the rest of mankind. They think it con­trary to the interests of Japan, to the commands of the emperor, to the will of the gods, and to the dic­tates of their conscience, to feel the least inclination towards a foreigner. This is in general the policy that may be said to actuate the mercantile powers of Europe, who, considered in this point of view, seem wholly to be animated with the meanest self-love; for they not only overlook the depredations of the piratical states of Barbary upon the subjects and property of those nations, who, both by every principle of religion and policy are the eternal enemies of the crescent, but even form disgraceful alliances with these freebooters, and submit to the grossest affronts and injuries from them, seeming even to authorise what humanity shudders to think of, for the sake of the pitiful advantage arising from the monopoly of the trade of the Mediterranean.

But in our times, we have less to fear the evil effects of patriotism. I am acquainted with men who are anxious to promote both the general and particular welfare of their country, and aspire to this laudable pursuit at every step; who divide their duties into tasks, and perform first those which are the most universally benevolent, and produce the most gene­ral [Page 298] good to their country; whose courage is not daunted when their friends weakly abandon them, either from the bare view of the power of their antagonists, or of the menacing authoritative frowns of the slanderers of their principles; who depart not for a moment, from the line of their duties, either from interested or erroneous motives; who feel that their souls are like lambent flames, which, tending in their own essence upwards, can never sink to the bottom; whom no refusal can intimi­date, no opposition drive from their stedfast and noble purpose; who never draw back; in whom the love of ease never renders the rational, but too often useless combat, against the ignorance and depravity of mankind, a burden; who, in a word, love their country with filial affection, forgive its injuries, and excuse its errors, and would rather endure death, in a thousand shapes, than once give room to think, that their zeal for their country would ever abate on account of the disregard it may shew to their personal merit. But the number of anti-patriots seems in our days to have increased, and much more so that of the hypocrites, who boast of their oaths and dearest duties, solely because these are sometimes the only paths to honours, dignity, and riches; while avarice and self-interest are the sole motives of all their actions. Many a one exclaims that he loves his country, who loves nothing but himself; many a one thunders forth his patriotism on all [Page 299] public occasions, while the cunning villain secretly stretches out his itching palm to receive his yearly wages in foreign gold. When here and there the torch of patriotism is uplifted, the sparks gene­rally fall on the fingers of the patriots, and this sentiment seems sometimes to actuate every breast, while it is, in fact, only the fashionable whim of the day; and our young fellows now travel to be­come patriots, as they formerly did to become ora­tors and cognoscenti.

Well founded national pride has thus both con­siderable advantages, as well as evils proceeding from these very advantages. Virtues and vices are often called into action by the same motives; it is the task of the philosopher to discover these mo­tives, and that of the legislator to make a proper use of the discovery.

Pride is therefore the source of so many beneficial talents, and of so many virtues, that we ought not to endeavour to destroy it, but to make it subservient to good purposes. Man would be a senseless block, if he were forbidden every thing that could lead him astray. We must inevitably banish good sense from a whole nation, if, more attentive to particular than to general imperfections we were to attempt to command sentiments, rather than to inspire them; and we should act against [Page 300] our own feelings, if, instead of adapting faults to the good of the whole, instead of conducting man­kind by their passions, and of employing their foibles, even to lead them to good, we were to smother principles and sentiments, which are able to animate a whole nation, and to excite it to the noblest actions.