able neighbours. The generality of mankind appear to be naturally endued with sense enough to make laws; but then it is not every one who has virtue sufficient to enact good laws. Call together from all the ends of the earth, the husbandmen, a simple quiet class, they will, at once, agree that the surplus of one's corn should be allowed to be sold to our neighbours; and that a law to the contrary is both absurd and inhuman; that coin, as representing provisions, should be no more adulterated than the products of the earth; that a father of a family should be master within his own walls; that religion should promote friendship and benevolence among men living in society, and not make them fanatics and persecutors; that the labouring and busy part of the world should not deprive themselves of the fruits of their industry, to bestow them on superstition and sloth: this plain assembly would in an hour make thirty such laws, all beneficial to mankind. But should Tamerlane come and subdue India; then you will see nothing but arbitrary laws. One shall squeeze a province to enrich a publican of Tamerlane's; another shall make it high-treason only for having dropped a free word concerning the mistress of the raja's first valet de chambre; a third shall take away from the farmer half his harvest, and dispute the remainder with him; and, what is worse than all this, there will be laws, by which a Tartar messenger shall come and take away your children in the cradle, making them soldiers or eunuchs according to their constitutions, and leave the father and mother to wipe away each other's tears. Q 2 Now, Now, whether is it best to be Tamerlane's dog or his subject? Doubtless, his dog has by much the best of it. CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAWS. THE following minutes were found among the papers of an eminent lawyer, and perhaps deserve a little consideration. No ecclesiastical law should ever be in force till it has formally received the express sanction of the government; by this it was that Athens and Rome never had any religious quarrels. Those quarrels appertain only to barbarous nations. To permit or prohibit working on holidays, should only be in the magistrates power; it is not the fit concern of priests to hinder men from cultivating their grounds. Every thing relating to marriages should depend solely on the magistrate; and let the priests be limited to the august function of the solemnization. Lending at interest to be intirely within the cognizance of the civil law, as by it commercial affairs are regulated. All ecclesiastics whatever should, as the state's subjects in all cases, be under the control and animadversion of the government. Away with that disgraceful absurdity of paying to a foreign priest the first year's produce of an estate, given to a priest of our own country. No priest should have it in his power to deprive a member of society of the least privilege, on pretence of his sins; for a priest being him self self a sinner, is to pray for sinners: he has no business to try and condemn them. Magistrates, farmers, and priests, are alike to contribute to the expences of the state, as alike belonging to the state. One weight, one measure, one custom. use; The punishments of criminals should be of when a man is hanged he is good for nothing, whereas a man condemned to the public works still benefits his country, and is a living admonition. Every law should be clear, uniform, and precise; explanations are for the most part corrup tions. The only infamy should be vice. A law should never clash with custom, for if the custom be good, the law must be faulty. LIBERTY. A. A Battery of cannon is playing close by your ears; are you at liberty to hear or not to hear it? B. Unquestionably I cannot but hear it. A. Would you have those cannon carry off your head, and your wife's and daughter's, who are walking with you? B. What a question is that? in my sober senses it is impossible, that I should will any such thing. It cannot be. A. Well, you necessarily hear the explosion of those cannon, and you necessarily are against you and your family being cut off by a cannon shot as you are taking the air; you have not the Q 3 power power not to hear, nor the power of willing to remain here. B. Nothing more evident. A. Accordingly you have come thirty paces to be out of the cannons.way: thus you have had the power of walking that little space with me. B. That again is clear. A. And if you had been paralytic you could not have avoided being exposed to this battery; you would not have had the power of being where you are: you would, necessarily, not only have heard the explosion, but received a cannon shot; and thus you would necessarily have been killed. B. Very true. A. In what then consists your liberty? if not in the power which your body has made use of to do, what your volition, by an absolute necessity, required. B. You put me to a stand. Liberty then is nothing but the power of doing what I will. A. Think of it, and see whether liberty can have any other meaning. B. At this rate my greyhound is as free as I am: he has necessarily a will to run at the sight of a hare, and likewise the power of running, if not lame; so that in nothing am I superior to my dog; this is levelling me with the beasts. A. Such are the wretched sophisms of the wretched sophists who have tutored you. Wretched thing indeed, to be in the same state of liberty as your dog! And are not you like your dog in a thousand things? in hunger, thirst, waking, sleeping; and your five senses, are they not common to him? are you for smelling smelling otherwise than through the nose? why then are you for having liberty in a manner different from him. B. But I have a soul continually reasoning, which my dog knows little of; simple ideas are very nearly all his portion, whereas I have a thousand metaphysical ideas. A. Well, you are a thousand times more free than he; that is, you have a thousand times more power of thinking than he still you are not free in a manner different from him. B. How am I not at liberty to will what I will? A. Your meaning? B. I mean what all the world means; is it not a common saying, Will is free? A. A proverb is no reason: please to explain yourself more clearly. B. I mean that I have the liberty of willing as I please. A. By your leave, there is no sense in that; don't you perceive that it is ridiculous to say, Í will will; you will necessarily, in consequence of the ideas occurring to you: Would you marry, yes, or no? B. But were I to say, I neither will the one nor the other ? A. That would be answering like him who said, some think Cardinal Mazarine dead, others believe him still living, and I believe neither one nor the other. B. Well, I have a mind to marry. A. Good! That is something of an answer; and why have you a mind to marry? B. Because I am in love with a young gentlewoman, who is handsome, of a sweet temper, Q 4 well |