V. Influence de la culture sur la liberté.

CHAP. 4: V. Influence of culture on liberty.

§ 1. The two causes whose effects I have just described are of a nature to produce, between individuals and nations, the most notable differences. It is evident that a man endowed with few faculties, and placed in circumstances unfavorable to their development, could not acquire the same degree of power and facility of action as a man placed in happier circumstances, with stronger faculties, and who would wish to profit, as much as it was in him to do, from this superiority of position and faculties.

§ 2. However, let us hasten to remark that, for the latter to preserve his superiority, he would indeed have to wish to take advantage of his advantages; for if his competitor were the only one to make an effort to develop himself, there is no doubt that, despite the disadvantage of his position and the inferiority of his natural faculties, he would soon succeed in surpassing him. The influence of a better organization and a happier situation can in effect be singularly modified by that of culture. If the first two causes tend to produce great inequalities, the last is perhaps of a nature to give rise to even more perceptible ones. If the man born with more powerful faculties preserves his preeminence over the other in things in which they have equally exercised themselves, the latter, despite the relative imperfection of his organs, has a still greater advantage over the former in things that he alone has learned.

What man can add by culture, not perhaps to his organs themselves, but to the power of using them, is immense: therein lies the true source of liberty. Who does not know the power of education! who does not know what the frequent repetition of the same acts can do! who has not remarked the extent and variety of the functions to which man manages to bend his faculties of every kind! and who has not been struck a thousand times in his life by the extreme advantage that he who has learned a thing has, in doing it, over him who has not exercised himself in it! Are there races so imperfect and so brutish that do not show themselves infinitely superior to the best-organized and most learned races, in the arts for which they have been formed and which the latter do not know? Where are the Europeans who, for certain exercises of hearing, sight, smell, of the hand or of any other part of the body, could measure themselves against the members of certain tribes belonging to what is most deformed and least cultivated in the races of color? Who among us could flatter himself that he could see, hear, or smell at such great distances as certain savages; that he could orient himself with as much certainty through forests where no path has been traced; that he could follow as exactly, on a terrain that could have received no imprint, the steps of man or of animals; that he could shoot a bow with such rare accuracy; that he could swim or dive with such prodigious facility? Could it be that these savages, otherwise so coarse, are better organized than we for these exercises?—Nothing indicates it. —Could it be that their local position is more favorable than ours to the preservation of the faculties of the species?—Far from it.

To what, then, is due the singular ease with which they execute certain acts that are absolutely impossible for us, or in which we show such a marked inferiority? To a single cause: to that which makes it so that, among us, certain persons execute with playfulness, and almost without thinking, things that others, with all possible application, would not manage to do, or would at first do only very imperfectly: to education, to exercise, to the long habit that their position and their way of life have made them contract, from childhood, of executing these acts that excite our astonishment.

§ 3. There is no mode of existence in which man is not obliged to give a certain development to his moral affections, to draw some advantage from his intellectual faculties, to direct in one sense or another the action of his physical forces. Everywhere some activity, some intelligence, some measure in the satisfaction of his appetites, some respect for the person and property of other men is necessary. Everywhere one must examine more or less attentively what use one is going to make, for one's preservation, of the organs with which one is provided; and to form these organs for certain acts. Hence, there is no mode of existence in which man does not acquire a certain liberty.

However, it must be agreed that, of all ways of life, that of civilized man is, without the slightest comparison, that in which the human species can manage to make the easiest and most extended use of its forces. The liberty of which a people is susceptible depends on the progress it is capable of making and that its position permits it to make in the arts of civilization; the liberty it enjoys depends on the progress it has already made in them. Each, in the measure of his natural capacity and of the advantages that his geographical position presents, is more or less free, according to whether he occupies a more or less elevated place on the scale of civilization.

§ 4. I have already stated this truth in my first chapter, and it is so simple that it ought not, it would seem, to suffer any sort of contradiction. There are few, however, more contradicted: civilization is accused of ruining morals, of debasing characters, of tending toward the dissolution of society, what do I know?

Examine a little the idea that most men have of the march of their species, observed collectively. It is held that aggregations of men, societies, nations have, like individuals, their childhood, their virility, their decrepitude; but at the same time it is believed that the progress of age produces on them effects entirely contrary to those it operates on individuals. It is thought that it is given only to individuals to become wiser as they grow older. As for nations, it is maintained that in growing old they become depraved, they are spoiled; and, a singular thing! it is, they say, in the age of senility that they allow themselves to be carried away by the greatest disorders: it is then that they become turbulent, debauched, corrupt, all excesses to which it would be, it seems, more natural to suppose they give themselves over in the ardor of youth, than when they are in decline and approaching their end. It is admitted that in growing old they become civilized; but it is said that in becoming civilized they degenerate, and that they degenerate all the more as they become more civilized.

This indictment of civilization is not new. One sees in the most ancient of histories that man, who was born innocent and not subject to death, as soon as he had laid his hand on the tree of knowledge, was but a vicious and perishable being. Not only did he degenerate horribly in the moral sense, but his physical nature itself underwent a perceptible alteration: his stature diminished; his existence, which was to never end, at first lasted no more than nine or ten centuries [^69] , and he continued to go on deteriorating. One ceases to see, in the books of Moses, races of giants after the flood, and men living eight or nine hundred years [^70] . With all the more reason, one no longer sees them in later eras. Homer, in his songs, often reproaches his contemporaries for having lost the height and strength of the heroes of Troy. Pliny assures that, in the whole of the human genus, the stature of man becomes smaller day by day: Cuncto mortalium generi minorem in dies fieri [^71] .

If we pass from the ancients to the moderns, we will see writers of the most opposed opinions accuse civilization of corrupting, of making men degenerate.

"The daily rising and falling of the waters of the Ocean," says Rousseau, "have not been more regularly subjected to the course of the star that gives us light during the night than the fate of morals and probity to the progress of the sciences and arts. The virtue has been seen to flee as their light rose upon our horizon, and the same phenomenon has been observed in all times and in all places [^72] ."

This opinion of Rousseau is already old and well known. Here are phrases much newer and which are less so.

"Already once," says M. de Constant, "the human species seemed plunged into the abyss. Then also a long civilization had enervated it... Each time," adds the same writer, "that the human genus arrives at an excessive civilization, it appears degraded for several generations [^73] ."

[^64]: Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, by M. Cabanis, t. II, p. 119. [^65]: Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, by M. Cabanis, t. II, p. 119. [^66]: Chronicon Slavorum, by Arnold of Lubeck, lib. III, cap. VIII. [^67]: Mémoires de Jean de Witt, part. I, chap. II. [^68]: Précis de la géographie universelle, t. I, p. 165. [^69]: Genesis, chap. V. [^70]: Genesis, chap. VI, v. 4. [^71]: Naturalis Historia, lib. VII, cap. XVI. [^72]: Discours sur les sciences et les arts, part. I. [^73]: De la religion, t. II, p. 240 and 241.“We are not,” observes M. de Châteaubriand, “among those chimerical minds who wish ceaselessly to improve, and all because human nature, according to them, is marching toward a perfection without end. It is not so: Providence has set bounds to this perfection. To stop it, it sufficed for Him who made us to put the morals of man in contrast with his enlightenment, and to oppose his heart to his mind [^74] ›

I have before me a voluminous pamphlet on the state of England, the publication of which is generally attributed to the British ministry. The author remarks that the great mass of the Russian nation has not yet reached the same degree of civilization as other peoples of Europe; and the proof he gives of this is that its morals are not as corrupt [^75] .

M. de Montlosier wrote textually in 1818 that the first thing the government had to do was to “march well-armed and WITH HEAVY CANNON, if it were possible, against all that is called the growth of enlightenment and the progress of civilization [^76] .”

A grave magistrate stated as a fact, four years later, that “societies perish by an excess of civilization, just as human bodies perish from an excess of corpulence; and this fact,” he said, “he gave as being alone able to explain the inconceivable agitations of which we were the witnesses [^77] .”

Another wrote that France, marching first at the head of civilization, naturally ran the risk of arriving first at that rendezvous with the abyss where all peoples end up when they have exchanged virtues for knowledge, and mysteries for discoveries, that is to say, when they are very civilized [^78] . These words were translated in most of the ministerial journals of the continent, and a powerful monarch found them so reasonable and so beautiful that he thought it his duty, from the extremities of Europe, to send his congratulations to the author in Paris [^79] .

I could easily make volumes of what is thus written against civilization. And this language, as one sees, is not only that of a few morose or bizarre minds; it is the expression of a popular prejudice, which is common to the most cultivated minds, and which in more than one country authority shares. No one denies that civilization makes us more ingenious, more learned, richer, more polished; but it is claimed that it depraves us. Some accuse it of making us turbulent and factious; others, weak and pusillanimous; almost everyone, selfish and sensual. Now these are not qualities well suited to making us free; and, if it were true that civilization tended to give them to us, my thesis would evidently be bad; I would be wrong to say that the freest peoples are the most civilized. Let us therefore examine a little this indictment of tendency that is made on all sides against civilization.

§ 5. It is essential first to agree on the terms. What is civilization?

The word civilization is visibly derived from that of city, CIVITAS. City is society. To civilize men is to make them fit for the city, for society; and to make them fit for society, what is that to do? it is evidently to give them civil, social ideas and habits. The true property of civilization is therefore, as the word indicates, to inspire in us ideas and morals favorable to the city, to society. A civilization that produced anti-civil or anti-social effects would be a civilization that was not one; it would be the contrary of civilization; and to say, as is done, that civilization tends to the ruin of the city, is to say a contradictory thing: this is visible from a simple inspection of the words.

But, it is observed, the word civilization is particularly, and even exclusively, employed to designate industry, the arts, the sciences, wealth; and the property of wealth and of all that engenders it, it is added, is to introduce softness and corruption into morals.

To this, two very simple answers:

The first is that those who thus employ the word civilization make a bad use of it; that they give it a much too restricted sense; that it signifies all that makes us fit for the city, and not only a part of what makes us sociable; that it includes morals at the same time as science, and that it is absurd to say that civilization shapes us for society without giving us any good social habit, or even by depraving our habits, and by imprinting upon us ones that are fatal to the city. Nor is it thus that it is understood by persons who pride themselves on having just and complete ideas of it; and, when they give to a nation the eminent title of civilized nation, they do not mean to say only of this nation that it is rich, polished, enlightened, industrious; they mean to say above all that it has good habits, that it understands and practices justice and morality better than another, and that it knows better under what conditions it is possible for men to live well in society [^80] .

My second answer is that even if the word civilization did not immediately imply the idea of morality, even if one wished to make it signify only the arts and wealth of peoples, it would still be insensate to claim that it tends to the corruption of morals.

It is true that the arts soften morals; it is not true that they corrupt them. They are reproached for softening courage, for destroying the virtues favorable to war. They do better than that: they destroy war itself. They tend to render useless the fierce virtues of conquering peoples; they teach men the secret of prospering simultaneously without harming one another; they place them in a situation where they can preserve themselves without those supernatural efforts that warlike peoples formerly imposed upon themselves the harsh obligation of making; efforts that are not long possible for humanity, a virtue that is worn out by the particular obstacles it encounters, by the reverses to which it exposes, above all by the successes it obtains, by the profits it brings, by the depravation that always follows fortune acquired in plunder, and which, when it comes to be extinguished, leaves the people of brigands, to whom it had at first given a false air of grandeur and nobility, in a state of degradation and debasement to which nothing can be compared.

The arts, I say, are harmful to war; but they are not harmful to the warlike virtues. They offer nothing incompatible with courage; they only change its nature; they give it a better motive; instead of inflaming it for brigandage, they inflame it against brigandage; instead of showing it goods to be seized, they give it goods to be preserved. The whole question is to know whether man is not as susceptible to being roused for his own defense as for the ruin of another; whether he can have ardor only for oppression, and can feel none against injustice. Now this is assuredly no question at all. History shows us enough examples of laborious and peaceful peoples, of peoples of artisans, of laborers, of merchants, pushed to war by the imperious need for defense, and who knew how to hold their own before their oppressors, although they were not supported like them by the experience of arms and the habit of discipline.

Far from the arts debasing courage, it seems that they make it both firmer and keener. The Greeks have more industry than the Turks: on which side is more intrepidity shown? The French are more cultivated than the Spaniards: which of these peoples has the most military valor? One could judge this in the last war; one could judge it above all in the deplorable affair of Llers, where, on both sides, the French alone remained on the field of battle, and where they fought among themselves for a people who, on both sides, had fled. If the arts are harmful to courage, the English must be the least brave people in Europe; for they are the richest and most industrious. However, the English army that fought the first war in Spain, the army that presented itself under the walls of Toulouse, the army that we met at Waterloo, that army which England kept so abundantly supplied with all things was surely not devoid of valor.

Far from the arts debasing courage, I will say again, they have the effect of purifying and ennobling it. There are always mixed with it, in the first ages of society, vices that dishonor it, a penchant for boastfulness, for ferocity, etc. Little by little it takes on a better character: it becomes more humane, more generous; it becomes above all simpler. In barbarous times, the warrior seeks to frighten his enemy by giving himself a formidable aspect: hence the tattooing of savages; hence all those more or less bizarre accoutrements destined to act on the imagination, and to weaken his adversary by frightening him; hence those outpourings of insults that barbarous warriors address to each other before coming to blows. All that falls away as man becomes civilized, and courage gains in real strength what it loses in vain ostentation. The character that then remains to it is that of a calm, dignified, reflective intrepidity, without noisy brilliance, without theatrical pomp. To judge the progress that civilization makes it undergo, it suffices to compare the attitude, the language, and the whole manner of being of the savage warrior to that of the very civilized warrior. I have seen in the salons of the capital officers belonging to the navy of the United States: nothing in their dress, in their words, in their manners, announced men of war; one would have said men of the study, men who had grown pale over books, and they spoke in effect like very instructed and very enlightened men: they were intrepid sailors, and who had taken warships by boarding.

The arts are therefore not harmful to military courage. They are no more unfavorable to civil courage. If peoples, as they become civilized, appear less inclined to resistance, it is not that they are more disposed to bear oppression, it is that oppression becomes less unbearable; it is that truly persons and fortunes are much more respected. Far from civilization tending to diminish civil courage, it is evident that it must increase it; for, giving us more enlightenment and dignity, it must make us more sensitive to injury, more impatient of all unjust domination. One has never said: o tyranny beloved of civilized peoples! as the Greeks said: o tyranny beloved of barbarians! Our ancestors, still uncultivated, suffered things that their descendants, more cultivated, would surely not consent to suffer; we have borne things that our nephews will find, I hope, intolerable. If, at epochs more or less close to us, so many follies and iniquities could be committed, without moving us, the least of which should have excited universal protest, it is certainly not that we were too civilized; it is quite, on the contrary, that we lacked culture; and the proof is that the same excesses that left the bulk of the public indifferent, excited to the highest degree the indignation of a small number of men who had the enlightened sentiment of the evil that was being done to France. There is therefore reason to believe that if their enlightenment had been more general, the public would not have been so forbearing.

Moreover, to be fully reassured about the effects of civilization relative to civil courage, it suffices to consider the reproach made against it, on the one hand, of making us ungovernable; a reproach, to say it in passing, that is no better founded than the inverse reproach; for nothing, to be sure, less resembles the spirit of rebellion than the hatred of political brigandage, and one can say that society never shows itself more loyal and more faithful than when the progress of civilization has taught it to defend its government against the ambitious and the perverse who never cease to push it to do evil [^81] .

But, it is said, the arts have enriched us, and it is thus that they have corrupted us [^82] . Another misapprehension. I could conceive of that being said of the art of plunder and extortion. I do believe, in effect, that the diverse arts by which the conqueror, the thief, the intriguer, the speculator procure for themselves the property of others, can contribute to perverting them even as they enrich them. But how dare one attribute the same effect to the useful arts, to the truly productive arts? Let us be careful not to confuse the people who work with the people who intrigue, and industrious men with industrial adventurers. If, to prosper, the latter need more than one vice, the former, to succeed, cannot do without the moral qualities that constitute the good man. Whereas the courtier draws, according to Montesquieu, his greatest means of success from baseness, flattery, treason, perfidy, the abandonment of his commitments, contempt for his social duties, the true man of industry finds his best chances of fortune in labor, activity, economy, probity, and the practice of all the social virtues. The arts, far from corrupting us by enriching us, therefore contribute to making us better at the same time as they make us richer.

Next, considered in itself, and abstracting from the means of acquiring it, wealth is far, no doubt, from being a cause of depravation. If there is ordinarily much corruption in courts, it is less the fault of the great fortunes enjoyed there than that of the particular species of industry by which one becomes rich there. The courtier, far from being rendered more perverse by his riches, owes to them what little good he has; it is to the state in which they place him that he owes that politeness, that urbanity, that propriety which, if they are not virtues, at least serve as a mask for his vices. Of all the means of reforming morals, wealth is perhaps the most effective: it assures us the benefit of a better education; it inspires in us tastes and makes us contract habits of a higher order; it places us in a situation where we have a greater interest in conducting ourselves well; it gives us a status and a consideration to manage; it procures for us leisure, finally, and all the means of acquiring enlightenment; and, far from thereby tending, as is said, to corrupt us, it is thereby above all that it tends to reform us. What likelihood, in effect, that enlightenment, which puts us in a state to perceive better the consequences of bad actions, should be for us one more stimulant to act badly? Doubtless it is not enough to know the good in order to do it; good habits must also come to the support of sound instruction: but it is only on sound instruction that good habits can be founded, and the beginning of all wisdom is in science.

Thus, even if one wished to see under the word civilization only ideas of arts, sciences, riches, it would still be evidently impossible to make it signify, by induction, the corruption of morals. Once again, what depraves is the manner of becoming rich, and not wealth; it is the arts that only make it change hands, and not the arts that produce it. Far from the latter, the only ones that civilization avows, leading us, through fortune, to depravation, it is clear as day that by increasing the mass of riches, they are the most active cause of the diffusion of enlightenment and the perfection of morals.

§ 6. But if, by its nature, civilization does not entail the ruin of morals and of society, how, it will be said, to explain history? One sees there as strong nations only the little-cultivated nations. Having reached the pinnacle of civilization, empires fall and crumble. See the States of antiquity [^83] .There is not in history what they claim to see there: one could not discover in it nations that have perished by an excess of culture. Properly speaking, there can be no excess in the culture of a people: it would be absurd to say that a people is cultivated to excess: one might as well say that it has too much instruction, too much knowledge, too many means of action, too much good sense and regularity in its morals, too much justice in its social relations... But it is even more insensate to claim that there was an excess in the civilization of the ancient peoples, and that it is for having been too civilized that they perished. Judge, indeed, of the excess of civilization that must have been reached by peoples who had founded their existence on war and on slavery: It would be curious to investigate the true state of the Romans when they had reached, as they say, the pinnacle of their civilization, that is to say, when they had completed their conquests; when they had pillaged, sacked, and destroyed an immense number of cities; massacred or reduced to servitude millions of human beings; and what all that had produced when they became, in their turn, the prey of the barbarians [^84] ? It is likely that instead of accusing civilization of their decadence, one would see in their final fall only the last consequence of their brigandage and of the execrable means by which they had risen. Far from the Roman empire having perished from an excess of civilization, it is evident that, if it had been civilized only to the point where some of its ancient provinces are today, and for example Gaul or Britain; if its soil had been covered with a population as compact, as advanced in all the arts, provided with as many means of defense and as interested in defending itself, the torrent of barbarians would have been easily contained. Let one judge, indeed, what a fine figure they would make today, despite all their fury and all their ardor for plunder, the half-naked bands of an Alaric or an Attila, before the disciplined armies of Europe, and in the presence of their formidable artillery; or else the most numerous fleet of Norman pirates before a small number of warships, furnished with their cannons, their cannonballs, their Congreve rockets, and set in motion by the steam engine!

Besides, even if the peoples of antiquity had been as civilized as they were in reality little so, there would still not be the slightest reason to accuse civilization of their ruin. One could give credit for their elevation to their culture, to the useful and life-giving arts they might have practiced; but it is evident that one could accuse of their fall only the barbarism of their enemies. One could complain, not that certain peoples were too civilized; but that many other peoples were not civilized enough. It was not the civilization of the Greeks that caused their ruin; it was the barbarism of the Romans. The Romans, in their turn, were not destroyed by their civilization; but by the brutality of the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, and all those hordes of barbarians who, for several centuries, did not cease to descend upon them. At the epoch when their empire collapsed, barbarism on earth was still much more robust and more vigorous than civilization. They could not, therefore, fail to succumb. How many times, since its birth, has civilization not experienced such catastrophes! It has been seen to expire successively in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, in Constantinople. But, stifled on one point, it was not long in being reborn on another; it developed there with more energy; it spread over vaster spaces. There is now no nation in Europe that it has not attached to the soil, that it has not more or less enlightened and softened; and I seek where, among us or around us, would be the barbarians powerful enough to destroy it.

§ 7. Those who find us too civilized make a reproach to us that in truth we hardly deserve. We are perishing from an excess of civilization, they say, and civilization, however great, however ancient it is, still finds itself, in many respects, in a veritable state of infancy. Most of our progress is of yesterday; the most essential is yet to be made; if our arts are advanced, our morals are far from being so, or if our private morals are so a little, our public morals are not so at all.

I touch here on the true cause of our discords. If the world is in a continual state of agitation, it is not, as is said, that civilization has penetrated too far into our arts, into our customs, into our private relations; it is that it has not yet penetrated enough into our political relations.

Observe in the ordinary commerce of life the elite of men who are called well-bred: do you see them insulting each other, accusing each other, attacking each other, as we do ceaselessly between governors and the governed? No, doubtless. And whence comes between them this habitual state of good understanding? from the fact that they know to what regards, to what rules of justice and propriety they must mutually submit to render their relations sure and easy. And whence come between us, governors and governed, these shameful dissensions? from the fact that, in the relations we have together, we do not wish to subject ourselves to the same rules of decorum and equity. As governors, we are haughty and iniquitous; as governed, we are troublemakers and mutinous: is it any wonder that we have difficulty understanding each other, and that our quarrels fill the world with trouble and confusion? But wait until time and experience have finally taught us to submit, in our public relations, to the same rules of morality that good people observe in their domestic and civil relations; wait until civilization has penetrated into government, only to the degree that it has entered into private life, and you will soon see our discords cease. The trouble and agitation that reign in society are therefore visibly the symptom of a defect, and not of an excess of civilization.

§ 8. In summary, civilization ceaselessly increases, it is recognized, the mass of our ideas, of our discoveries, of our riches, of all our means of action. Far from corrupting us thereby, it is thereby above all, we have just seen, that it tends to amend us. It softens morals, it purifies and elevates them; it is favorable to justice, to dignity, to courage; it implies the ideas of order and morality as strongly as those of wealth and industry. It therefore contains within itself all the elements of liberty, and I am right to say that the most cultivated peoples are the freest.

§ 9. I ask, before finishing, that one pay attention to the manner in which I express myself. I say that a people is all the freer the more civilized it is, that the more civilized it is, the freer it is; but I do not say that its liberty is necessarily equal to its civilization. This proposition, in effect, could very well not be exact; and, in truth, it almost never happens that it is.

The reason is simple: it is that a people is never perfectly isolated; it is that it is surrounded by populations more or less civilized than itself, and whose civilization must necessarily modify the effects of its own and influence for good or ill its liberty. A commune is tied to its administrative center; the departments are linked to the capital; France to the rest of Europe; Europe has relations with America, and the European race with the nations of Africa and Asia.

In this state of universal connection in which almost all peoples find themselves with one another, one could doubtless say that the liberty of the human genus is equal to its civilization; but one surely cannot answer that the liberty of a particular people is exactly proportioned to the state of its morals, its industry, its enlightenment. It is in effect very possible, and even very ordinary, that the ignorance and vices of a neighboring people or even of a distant people come to thwart the result of its instruction and its good habits, and to render it less free than it would be without the interposition of this foreign element.

Thus, for example, it is not doubtful that the backward state of most of our departments harms the liberty of the capital a great deal. One cannot doubt any more that the liberty of France suffers from the state of the surrounding countries which are less advanced than it. The Channel does not completely subtract English liberty from the influence of the continent; nor even the Atlantic that of the United States from what remains of barbarism in Europe. When President Monroe says, in his message, that at the distance America is from us, its liberty could not be affected by our political state [^85] , it is evident that he is mistaken, and the fact itself proves it; for the state of Europe obliges America to raise fortifications on its coastline, to maintain a strong navy, to have numerous militias and an army; and, certainly, these costly and inconvenient precautions, which the imperfect state of our civilization obliges it to take, cannot but harm its liberty a great deal.

However, whatever this reciprocal influence that most nations exercise upon one another, whether for good or for ill, it is certain that it has its limits, and that it changes only in part the results of the civilization developed in each country. Thus, although the moral and political state of Europe harms the liberty of the Anglo-Americans, North America, politically more civilized than Europe, has by this sole fact, at least in this respect, much more liberty. Thus France remains freer than nations less civilized than it, despite the efforts that these nations make to lower it to their level; thus the capital, despite the pernicious influence of the departments, has much more liberty than they possess, for the sole reason that there is in its bosom much more intelligence, activity, industry, knowledge, wealth, good habits, and, in general, elements of order and strength of every kind. Liberty is perhaps nowhere exactly proportioned to civilization; but wherever civilization is more advanced, liberty is greater; everywhere populations become freer as they become more cultivated.

§ 10. For the rest, we are going to see if the study of the facts confirms these remarks; and, traversing one after the other the principal states through which civilization has passed, from the most unformed to the most perfected, we will examine what is the degree of liberty that each of these degrees of culture comprises.

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Notes

[^69]: Genesis, chap. 5. [^70]: Ibid. chap. 11, verse 10 et seq. Human life, after the flood, has already decreased by nearly half. [^71]: M. Cuvier explains very well what could have caused the illusion that made the ancients suppose that man was thus continually losing his strength and his height. “It is probable,” observes this illustrious naturalist, “that elephant bones have often been taken for human bones, and that it is they which have occasioned all those so-called discoveries of giants’ tombs of which antiquity so often speaks.” (Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles). M. Cuvier cites, on this subject, a multitude of ancient authors who all speak of monstrous bones that had been unearthed by various causes, and which were taken sometimes for those of Orestes, sometimes for those of Entellus or Otus, sometimes for those of Antaeus or other heroes or giants. “At all times,” observes another geologist, “fossil elephant bones have been found; but these bones until now had almost always been misidentified, and it is to their discoveries that we owe the fabulous stories of the unearthing of the corpses of ancient giants: for, in a time when anatomy had made so little progress, the love of the marvelous could all the better seize upon such events to accredit ideas that strike the imagination, as the elephant is, dimensions aside, one of the animals whose skeleton presents the most resemblance to that of man. One could make a whole volume of the stories of fossil bones of large quadrupeds that ignorance or fraud have passed off as the remains of human giants.” (Lettres sur les Révolutions du globe, by Alex. Bertrand, p. 169. Paris, 1824.) [^72]: Discourse on the Influence of the Sciences and Arts. [^73]: De la Religion, etc., vol. I, p. 236 and note. This citation has drawn several reproaches upon me. M. de Constant complained, first, that I had made his name appear in a list where enemies of civilization are found; second, that I had not faithfully cited his words; third, that I had concluded from his words that he would wish for civilization to be able to retreat (Revue Encyclop., issue of Feb. 1826, pp. 419, 420). Is it not I, here, who would have some cause to complain? I conclude absolutely nothing from M. de Constant's words; I do not in the least doubt his sentiments in favor of civilization; I limit myself to making known the judgment he passes on its effects. Now, this judgment is that a long civilization enervates men, that when the human species arrives at an excessive civilization, it appears degraded for several generations. The author adds, it is true, that this degradation is only temporary, and that the species, setting itself in motion again, arrives at new perfections. But this restriction certainly does not destroy the main idea, and M. de Constant has nonetheless said that a long civilization enervates and degrades us, at least temporarily. I could have found phrases of this kind in a multitude of authors: if M. B. Constant is one of those I have cited by preference, it is because nothing was more proper to show the force of the prejudice I undertook to combat than to show that this prejudice had not yet lost all its empire, even over the most elevated minds. [^74]: Du Renouvellement intégral, pamphlet, 8vo, Nov. 1823. [^75]: De l'état de l'Angleterre au commencement de 1822, p. 132. [^76]: De la monarchie française en 1816, p. 450. [^77]: Indictment of M. Bellart in the La Rochelle affair. See the Moniteur of June 14, 1822. [^78]: Indictment of M. de Marchangy in the same affair. See the journals of late August and early September. [^79]: See, in the journals of early December 1822, a letter from the Emperor Alexander to M. de Marchangy. [^80]: I cannot at all admit, with M. de Constant, that the word civilization implied the ideas of honor, morality, humanity, and sociability only in its origin, and that it has lost this meaning in coming down to us (Rev. Encyclop., issue of Feb. 1826, pp. 121 and 123). When one contrasts a civilized people with a savage people, it is their morals even more than their arts that one seeks to contrast: it is by morals above all that one is civilized or barbarian; and whenever a people is guilty of some trait of perfidy or cruelty: those, one observes, are the practices of barbarism: that is not how civilized nations behave. [^81]: The expression a society faithful to its government is one that does not seem too suitable. Society doubtless has the duty to be faithful to reason, to justice; but it seems shocking to say that it owes fidelity to its delegates, to its agents, to the men it entrusts with any portion of its affairs. However, if one wishes to transfer to society a virtue that is above all the duty of its ministers, I will say that faithful societies are not those that approve everything the government does, but those that approve only what it does well, that courageously prevent it from doing ill, that strive to shield it from the influence of bad counsel. [^82]: At the same time that the laws encourage the movement of the arts and of industry as a principle of prosperity for the State, opinion will hasten to chastise it as a source of depravation for morals. (Montlosier, De la Monarchie française en 1816, p. 314.) [^83]: The already cited Indictment of M. de Marchangy. [^84]: This will be seen, in part, further on, ch. 75 [^85]: See in the French journals of early January 1825, the message in question here.