GENERAL CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTIONS AND RUIN OF ANCIENT STATES.
Cupidity had nevertheless excited among men a constant and universal conflict, which incessantly prompting individuals and societies to reciprocal invasions, occasioned successive revolutions, and returning agitations.
And first, in the savage and barbarous state of the first men, this audacious and fierce cupidity produced rapine, violence, and murder, and retarded for a long time the progress of civilization.
When afterwards societies began to be formed, the effect of bad habits, communicated to laws and governments, corrupted their institutions and objects, and established arbitrary and factitious rights, which depraved the ideas of justice, and the morality of the people.
Thus one man being stronger than another, their inequality—an accident of nature—was taken for her law;* and the strong being able to take the life of the weak, and yet sparing him, arrogated over his person an abusive right of property; and the slavery of individuals prepared the way for the slavery of nations.
*Almost all the ancient philosophers and politicians have laid it down as a principle that men are born unequal, that nature his created some to be free, and others to be slaves. Expressions of this kind are to be found in Aristotle, and even in Plato, called the divine, doubtless in the same sense as the mythological reveries which he promulgated. With all the people of antiquity, the Gauls, the Romans, the Athenians, the right of the strongest was the right of nations; and from the same principle are derived all the political disorders and public national crimes that at present exist.
Because the head of a family could be absolute in his house, he made his own affections and desires the rule of his conduct; he gave or resumed his goods without equality, without justice; and paternal despotism laid the foundation of despotism in government.*
* Upon this single expression it would be easy to write a
long and important chapter. We might prove in it, beyond
contradiction, that all the abuses of national governments,
have sprung from those of domestic government, from that
government called patriarchal, which superficial minds have
extolled without having analyzed it. Numberless facts
demonstrate, that with every infant people, in every savage
and barbarous state, the father, the chief of the family, is
a despot, and a cruel and insolent despot. The wife is his
slave, the children his servants. This king sleeps or
smokes his pipe, while his wife and daughters perform all
the drudgery of the house, and even that of tillage and
cultivation, as far as occupations of this nature are
practised in such societies; and no sooner have the boys
acquired strength then they are allowed to beat the females
and make them serve and wait upon them as they do upon their
fathers. Similar to this is the state of our own
uncivilized peasants. In proportion as civilization
spreads, the manners become milder, and the condition of the
women improves, till, by a contrary excess, they arrive at
dominion, and then a nation becomes effeminate and corrupt.
It is remarkable that parental authority is great in
proportion as the government is despotic. China, India, and
Turkey are striking examples of this. One would suppose that
tyrants gave themselves accomplices and interested subaltern
despots to maintain their authority. In opposition to this
the Romans will be cited, but it remains to be proved that
the Romans were men truly free and their quick passage from
their republican despotism to their abject servility under
the emperors, gives room at least for considerable doubt as
to that freedom.
In societies formed on such foundations, when time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations.
Sometimes, opposing itself to all social compact, or breaking that which already existed, it committed the inhabitants of a country to the tumultuous shock of all their discords; and states thus dissolved, and reduced to the condition of anarchy, were tormented by the passions of all their members.