These little adventures occasioned me to make some observations, which of course were very ingenious and profound, upon the subject of laws; and I easily perceived that it was with them as it is with our garments: I must wear a doliman at Constantinople, and a coat at Paris.
"If all human laws," said I, "are matters of convention, nothing is necessary but to make a good bargain." The citizens of Delhi and Agra say that they have made a very bad one with Tamerlane: those of London congratulate themselves on having made a very good one with King William of Orange. A citizen of London once said to me: "Laws are made by necessity, and observed through force." I asked him if force did not also occasionally make laws, and if William, the bastard and conqueror, had not chosen simply to issue his orders without condescending to make any convention or bargain with the English at all. "True," said he, "it was so: we were oxen at that time; William brought us under the yoke, and drove us with a goad; since that period we have been metamorphosed into men; the horns, however, remain with us still, and we use them as weapons against every man who attempts making us work for him and not for ourselves."
With my mind full of all these reflections, I could not help feeling a sensible gratification in thinking, that there exists a natural law entirely independent of all human conventions: The fruit of my labor ought to be my own: I am bound to honor my father and mother: I have no right over the life of my neighbor, nor has my neighbor over mine, etc. But when I considered, that from Chedorlaomer to Mentzel, colonel of hussars, every one kills and plunders his neighbor according to law, and with his patent in his pocket, I was greatly distressed.
I was told that laws existed even among robbers, and that there were laws also in war. I asked what were the laws of war. "They are," said some one, "to hang up a brave officer for maintaining a weak post without cannon; to hang a prisoner, if the enemy have hanged any of yours; to ravage with fire and sword those villages which shall not have delivered up their means of subsistence by an appointed day, agreeably to the commands of the gracious sovereign of the vicinage." "Good," said I, "that is the true spirit of laws." After acquiring a good deal of information, I found that there existed some wise laws, by which a shepherd is condemned to nine years' imprisonment and labor in the galleys, for having given his sheep a little foreign salt. My neighbor was ruined by a suit on account of two oaks belonging to him, which he had cut down in his wood, because he had omitted a mere form of technicality with which it was almost impossible that he should have been acquainted; his wife died, in consequence, in misery; and his son is languishing out a painful existence. I admit that these laws are just, although their execution is a little severe; but I must acknowledge I am no friend to laws which authorize a hundred thousand neighbors loyally to set about cutting one another's throats. It appears to me that the greater part of mankind have received from nature a sufficient portion of what is called common sense for making laws, but that the whole world has not justice enough to make good laws.
Simple and tranquil cultivators, collected from every part of the world, would easily agree that every one should be free to sell the superfluity of his own corn to his neighbor, and that every law contrary to it is both inhuman and absurd; that the value of money, being the representative of commodities, ought no more to be tampered with than the produce of the earth; that the father of a family should be master in his own house; that religion should collect men together, to unite them in kindness and friendship, and not to make them fanatics and persecutors; and that those who labor ought not to be deprived of the fruits of their labor, to endow superstition and idleness. In the course of an hour, thirty laws of this description, all of a nature beneficial to mankind, would be unanimously agreed to.
But let Tamerlane arrive and subjugate India, and you will then see nothing but arbitrary laws. One will oppress and grind down a whole province, merely to enrich one of Tamerlane's collectors of revenue; another will screw up to the crime of high treason, speaking contemptuously of the mistress of a rajah's chief valet; a third will extort from the farmer a moiety of his harvest, and dispute with him the right to the remainder; in short, there will be laws by which a Tartar sergeant will be authorized to seize your children in the cradle—to make one, who is robust, a soldier—to convert another, who is weak, into a eunuch—and thus to leave the father and mother without assistance and without consolation.
But which would be preferable, being Tamerlane's dog or his subject? It is evident that the condition of his dog would be by far the better one.
LAWS (SPIRIT OF).
It would be admirable, if from all the books upon laws by Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Barbeyrac, and Burlamaqui, some general law was adopted by the whole of the tribunals of Europe upon succession, contracts, revenue offences, etc. But neither the citations of Grotius, nor those of Puffendorf, nor those of the "Spirit of Laws," have ever led to a sentence in the Châtelet of Paris or the Old Bailey of London. We weary ourselves with Grotius, pass some agreeable moments with Montesquieu; but if process be deemed advisable, we run to our attorney.