A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.
A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called “loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.
Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to their own particular religion.
For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be allowed to worship as they saw fit.
Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police stood watch lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and Italian visitors away.
This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.
It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.
Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere “trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.
His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.