Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

Having thus considered every kind of civil society in itself, we shall compare them, so as to note their relations one with another; great and small, strong and weak, attacking one another, insulting one another, destroying one another; and in this perpetual action and reaction causing more misery and loss of life than if men had preserved their original freedom. We shall inquire whether too much or too little has not been accomplished in the matter of social institutions; whether individuals who are subject to law and to men, while societies preserve the independence of nature, are not exposed to the ills of both conditions without the advantages of either, and whether it would not be better to have no civil society in the world rather than to have many such societies. Is it not that mixed condition which partakes of both and secures neither?

“Per quem neutrum licet, nec tanquam in bello paratum esse, nec tanquam in pace securum.”—Seneca De Trang: Animi, cap. I.

Is it not this partial and imperfect association which gives rise to tyranny and war? And are not tyranny and war the worst scourges of humanity?

Finally we will inquire how men seek to get rid of these difficulties by means of leagues and confederations, which leave each state its own master in internal affairs, while they arm it against any unjust aggression. We will inquire how a good federal association may be established, what can make it lasting, and how far the rights of the federation may be stretched without destroying the right of sovereignty.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre suggested an association of all the states of Europe to maintain perpetual peace among themselves. Is this association practicable, and supposing that it were established, would it be likely to last? These inquiries lead us straight to all the questions of international law which may clear up the remaining difficulties of political law. Finally we shall lay down the real principles of the laws of war, and we shall see why Grotius and others have only stated false principles.

I should not be surprised if my pupil, who is a sensible young man, should interrupt me saying, “One would think we were building our edifice of wood and not of men; we are putting everything so exactly in its place!” That is true; but remember that the law does not bow to the passions of men, and that we have first to establish the true principles of political law. Now that our foundations are laid, come and see what men have built upon them; and you will see some strange sights!

Then I set him to read Telemachus, and we pursue our journey; we are seeking that happy Salentum and the good Idomeneus made wise by misfortunes. By the way we find many like Protesilas and no Philocles, neither can Adrastes, King of the Daunians, be found.

But let our readers picture our travels for themselves, or take the same journeys with Telemachus in their hand; and let us not suggest to them painful applications which the author himself avoids or makes in spite of himself.

Moreover, Emile is not a king, nor am I a god, so that we are not distressed that we cannot imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good they did; none know better than we how to keep to our own place, none have less desire to leave it. We know that the same task is allotted to all; that whoever loves what is right with all his heart, and does the right so far as it is in his power, has fulfilled that task. We know that Telemachus and Mentor are creatures of the imagination. Emile does not travel in idleness and he does more good than if he were a prince. If we were kings we should be no greater benefactors. If we were kings and benefactors we should cause any number of real evils for every apparent good we supposed we were doing. If we were kings and sages, the first good deed we should desire to perform, for ourselves and for others, would be to abdicate our kingship and return to our present position.

I have said why travel does so little for every one. What makes it still more barren for the young is the way in which they are sent on their travels. Tutors, more concerned to amuse than to instruct, take them from town to town, from palace to palace, where if they are men of learning and letters, they make them spend their time in libraries, or visiting antiquaries, or rummaging among old buildings transcribing ancient inscriptions. In every country they are busy over some other century, as if they were living in another country; so that after they have travelled all over Europe at great expense, a prey to frivolity or tedium, they return, having seen nothing to interest them, and having learnt nothing that could be of any possible use to them.

All capitals are just alike, they are a mixture of all nations and all ways of living; they are not the place in which to study the nations. Paris and London seem to me the same town. Their inhabitants have a few prejudices of their own, but each has as many as the other, and all their rules of conduct are the same. We know the kind of people who will throng the court. We know the way of living which the crowds of people and the unequal distribution of wealth will produce. As soon as any one tells me of a town with two hundred thousand people, I know its life already. What I do not know about it is not worth going there to learn.

To study the genius and character of a nation you should go to the more remote provinces, where there is less stir, less commerce, where strangers seldom travel, where the inhabitants stay in one place, where there are fewer changes of wealth and position. Take a look at the capital on your way, but go and study the country far away from that capital. The French are not in Paris, but in Touraine; the English are more English in Mercia than in London, and the Spaniards more Spanish in Galicia than in Madrid. In these remoter provinces a nation assumes its true character and shows what it really is; there the good or ill effects of the government are best perceived, just as you can measure the arc more exactly at a greater radius.

The necessary relations between character and government have been so clearly pointed out in the book of L’Esprit des Lois, that one cannot do better than have recourse to that work for the study of those relations. But speaking generally, there are two plain and simple standards by which to decide whether governments are good or bad. One is the population. Every country in which the population is decreasing is on its way to ruin; and the countries in which the population increases most rapidly, even were they the poorest countries in the world, are certainly the best governed. [Footnote: I only know one exception to this rule—it is China.] But this population must be the natural result of the government and the national character, for if it is caused by colonisation or any other temporary and accidental cause, then the remedy itself is evidence of the disease. When Augustus passed laws against celibacy, those laws showed that the Roman empire was already beginning to decline.

Citizens must be induced to marry by the goodness of the government, not compelled to marry by law; you must not examine the effects of force, for the law which strives against the constitution has little or no effect; you should study what is done by the influence of public morals and by the natural inclination of the government, for these alone produce a lasting effect. It was the policy of the worthy Abbe de Saint-Pierre always to look for a little remedy for every individual ill, instead of tracing them to their common source and seeing if they could not all be cured together. You do not need to treat separately every sore on a rich man’s body; you should purify the blood which produces them. They say that in England there are prizes for agriculture; that is enough for me; that is proof enough that agriculture will not flourish there much longer.

The second sign of the goodness or badness of the government and the laws is also to be found in the population, but it is to be found not in its numbers but in its distribution. Two states equal in size and population may be very unequal in strength; and the more powerful is always that in which the people are more evenly distributed over its territory; the country which has fewer large towns, and makes less show on this account, will always defeat the other. It is the great towns which exhaust the state and are the cause of its weakness; the wealth which they produce is a sham wealth, there is much money and few goods. They say the town of Paris is worth a whole province to the King of France; for my own part I believe it costs him more than several provinces. I believe that Paris is fed by the provinces in more senses than one, and that the greater part of their revenues is poured into that town and stays there, without ever returning to the people or to the king. It is inconceivable that in this age of calculators there is no one to see that France would be much more powerful if Paris were destroyed. Not only is this ill-distributed population not advantageous to the state, it is more ruinous than depopulation itself, because depopulation only gives as produce nought, and the ill-regulated addition of still more people gives a negative result. When I hear an Englishman and a Frenchman so proud of the size of their capitals, and disputing whether London or Paris has more inhabitants, it seems to me that they are quarrelling as to which nation can claim the honour of being the worst governed.

Study the nation outside its towns; thus only will you really get to know it. It is nothing to see the apparent form of a government, overladen with the machinery of administration and the jargon of the administrators, if you have not also studied its nature as seen in the effects it has upon the people, and in every degree of administration. The difference of form is really shared by every degree of the administration, and it is only by including every degree that you really know the difference. In one country you begin to feel the spirit of the minister in the manoeuvres of his underlings; in another you must see the election of members of parliament to see if the nation is really free; in each and every country, he who has only seen the towns cannot possibly know what the government is like, as its spirit is never the same in town and country. Now it is the agricultural districts which form the country, and the country people who make the nation.

This study of different nations in their remoter provinces, and in the simplicity of their native genius, gives a general result which is very satisfactory, to my thinking, and very consoling to the human heart; it is this: All the nations, if you observe them in this fashion, seem much better worth observing; the nearer they are to nature, the more does kindness hold sway in their character; it is only when they are cooped up in towns, it is only when they are changed by cultivation, that they become depraved, that certain faults which were rather coarse than