In 1769, a traveller delivered the following narrative: "I saw, in the
course of my journey, a large and populous country, in which all offices
and places were purchasable; I do not mean clandestinely, and in
evasion of the law, but publicly, and in conformity to it. The right to
judge, in the last resort, of the honor, property, and life of the
citizen, was put to auction in the same manner as the right and property
in a few acres of land. Some very high commissions in the army are
conferred only on the highest bidder. The principal mystery of their
religion is celebrated for the petty sum of three sesterces, and if the
celebrator does not obtain this fee he remains idle like a porter
without employment.
"Fortunes in this country are not made by agriculture, but are derived
from a certain game of chance, in great practice there, in which the
parties sign their names, and transfer them from hand to hand. If they
lose, they withdraw into the mud and mire of their original extraction;
if they win, they share in the administration of public affairs; they
marry their daughters to mandarins, and their sons become a species of
mandarins also.
"A considerable number of the citizens have their whole means of
subsistence assigned upon a house, which possesses in fact nothing, and
a hundred persons have bought for a hundred thousand crowns each the
right of receiving and paying the money due to these citizens upon their
assignments on this imaginary hotel; rights which they never exercise,
as they in reality know nothing at all of what is thus supposed to pass
through their hands.
"Sometimes a proposal is made and cried about the streets, that all who
have a little money in their chest should exchange it for a slip of
exquisitely manufactured paper, which will free you from all pecuniary
care, and enable you to pass through life with ease and comfort. On the
morrow an order is published, compelling you to change this paper for
another, much better. On the following day you are deafened with the cry
of a new paper, cancelling the two former ones. You are ruined! But long
heads console you with the assurance, that within a fortnight the
newsmen will cry up some proposal more engaging.
"You travel into one province of this empire, and purchase articles of
food, drink, clothing, and lodging. If you go into another province, you
are obliged to pay duties upon all those commodities, as if you had just
arrived from Africa. You inquire the reason of this, but obtain no
answer; or if, from extraordinary politeness, any one condescends to
notice your questions, he replies that you come from a province reputed
foreign, and that, consequently, you are obliged to pay for the
convenience of commerce. In vain you puzzle yourself to comprehend how
the province of a kingdom can be deemed foreign to that kingdom.
"On one particular occasion, while changing horses, finding myself
somewhat fatigued, I requested the postmaster to favor me with a glass
of wine. 'I cannot let you have it,' says he; 'the superintendents of
thirst, who are very considerable in number, and all of them remarkably
sober, would accuse me of drinking to excess, which would absolutely be
my ruin.' 'But drinking a single glass of wine,' I replied, 'to repair a
man's strength, is not drinking to excess; and what difference can it
make whether that single glass of wine is taken by you or me?'
"'Sir,' replied the man, 'our laws relating to thirst are much more
excellent than you appear to think them. After our vintage is finished,
physicians are appointed by the regular authorities to visit our
cellars. They set aside a certain quantity of wine, such as they judge
we may drink consistently with health. At the end of the year they
return; and if they conceive that we have exceeded their restriction by
a single bottle; they punish us with very severe fines; and if we make
the slightest resistance, we are sent to Toulon to drink salt-water.
Were I to give you the wine you ask, I should most certainly be charged
with excessive drinking. You must see to what danger I should be exposed
from the supervisors of our health.'
"I could not refrain from astonishment at the existence of such a
system; but my astonishment was no less on meeting with a disconsolate
and mortified pleader, who informed me that he had just then lost, a
little beyond the nearest rivulet, a cause precisely similar to one he
had gained on this side of it. I understood from him that, in his
country, there are as many different codes of laws as there are cities.
His conversation raised my curiosity. 'Our nation,' said he, 'is so
completely wise and enlightened, that nothing is regulated in it. Laws,
customs, the rights of corporate bodies, rank, precedence, everything is
arbitrary; all is left to the prudence of the nation.'
"I happened to be still in this same country when it became involved in
a war with some of its neighbors. This war was nicknamed 'The Ridicule,'
because there was much to be lost and nothing to be gained by it. I went
upon my travels elsewhere, and did not return till the conclusion of
peace, when the nation seemed to be in the most dreadful state of
misery; it had lost its money, its soldiers, its fleets, and its
commerce. I said to myself, its last hour is come; everything, alas!
must pass away. Here is a nation absolutely annihilated. What a dreadful
pity! for a great part of the people were amiable, industrious, and gay,
after having been formerly coarse, superstitious, and barbarous.
"I was perfectly astonished, at the end of only two years, to find its
capital and principal cities more opulent than ever. Luxury had
increased, and an air of enjoyment prevailed everywhere. I could not
comprehend this prodigy; and it was only after I had examined into the
government of the neighboring nations that I could discover the cause of
what appeared so unaccountable. I found that the government of all the
rest was just as bad as that of this nation, and that this nation was
superior to all the rest in industry.
"A provincial of the country I am speaking of was once bitterly
complaining to me of all the grievances under which he labored. He was
well acquainted with history. I asked him if he thought he should have
been happier had he lived a hundred years before, when his country was
in a comparative state of barbarism, and a citizen was liable to be
hanged for having eaten flesh in Lent? He shook his head in the
negative. Would you prefer the times of the civil wars, which began at
the death of Francis II.; or the times of the defeats of St. Quentin and
Pavia; or the long disorders attending the wars against the English; or
the feudal anarchy; or the horrors of the second race of kings, or the
barbarity of the first? At every successive question, he appeared to
shudder more violently. The government of the Romans seemed to him the
most intolerable of all. 'Nothing can be worse,' he said, 'than to be
under foreign masters.' At last we came to the Druids. 'Ah!' he
exclaimed, 'I was quite mistaken: it is still worse to be governed by
sanguinary priests.' He admitted, at last, although with sore
reluctance, that the time he lived in was, all things considered, the
least intolerable and hateful."