I. Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples nomades [ 118 ] .

CHAP. 6: I. Liberty compatible with the way of life of nomadic peoples [^118] .

§ 1. In the preceding chapter, we saw Rousseau make liberty a distinctive attribute of savage peoples; in this one, we are going to see other writers consider it, in their turn, as an appanage of nomadic peoples.

“These peoples,” says Montesquieu, “enjoy a great liberty; for, as they do not cultivate the land, they are not attached to it: they are wandering, vagabond; and if a chief wished to take away their liberty, they would first go seek it with another, or would withdraw into the woods to live there with their family [^119] .”

So then, nomadic peoples are free, according to Montesquieu, because they can withdraw into the woods; just as savage peoples are free, according to Rousseau, because, if they are chased from one tree, they can take refuge at the foot of another. There is, as one sees, much analogy in the ideas that these two great writers appear to have here of liberty.

In truth, what Montesquieu says in this place does not prevent him from recognizing, a few pages further on, that the nomadic peoples of great Tartary are in political slavery [^120] . But then he also declares the Tartars the most singular people on earth (these are his expressions).

These people, he says, have no cities; they have no forests, they have few marshes; their rivers are almost always frozen; they inhabit an immense plain, they have pastures and herds, and consequently goods, and they have no sort of retreat [^121] . Now, the important thing, to be free, is to know where to take refuge, where to flee; it is in being able to flee that liberty consists; and the general rule is that one is all the freer the more easily one can save oneself, the less one is burdened with goods, the less one is attached to the land, the less one cultivates it, the less one has hearth or home, the more one lives by plunder and theft in the midst of a wandering and vagabond life.

These prejudices were those of the time in which Montesquieu wrote; and if such an eminent mind did not know how to defend himself from them, one feels that one must not ask for more just ideas from writers of a lower order. I have cited Raynal alongside the author of Émile: I can have Mably speak after the author of the Esprit des lois. “One will easily judge,” says Mably, speaking of the Franks, while they still wandered in the train of their herds in the forests of Germania, “one will easily judge that they must have been sovereignly free.” And does one wish to know for what reason one can make this judgment, according to Mably? it is because they were a people proud, brutal, without a homeland, without laws, living only on rapine [^122] .

Assuredly, these are singular ways of understanding liberty. A people is free because it does not know how to cultivate the land, because it produces nothing, because it possesses nothing, because nothing prevents it from fleeing, because it lives only by plunder; because it is at once ignorant, brutal, intemperate, carried away, a thief. Is it not strange to see men like Montesquieu, and even like Mably, make liberty the appanage of such morals?

§ 2. I will not return to what I have previously said of this sad faculty of fleeing, which is the common lot of all wandering and miserable peoples, and in which some have wished to place liberty. Liberty consists not in being able to flee when one would wish to stay; but in being able to stay or depart, as one desires. The nomad who is obliged to strike his tent and abandon his pastures is no freer than the savage who is expelled from his hut and his hunting grounds. Montesquieu felt this so well that he finds the Tartars, as miserable as they are, still too rich to be free; and he presents the few resources they possess as one of the causes of their subjection. He does not see that, even if they possessed nothing, violence would still be done to them by forcing them to flee against their just will, and that, consequently, it is not sufficient, in any case, to be able to flee in order to be free. Servitude, moreover, is not one of those evils from which one can escape by fleeing; it is closely linked to the weakness, the ignorance, the vices, the injustices of men, and a coarse and vicious people could change its place in vain, it would find servitude again wherever it went to establish itself.

I must remark, on this subject, how exaggerated is what Montesquieu says of the influence that climate, soil, and other external circumstances exercise on liberty. As much as I like to see him speak of the long hair of the Frankish kings in connection with the nature of the terrain [^123] , so too do I like to see him explain the servitude of Asia by the snow that is lacking on its mountains [^124] , or the liberty of the ancient Athenians by the sterility of the soil of Attica [^125] .

There may surely be in the physical constitution of the country inhabited by the Tartars rather strong obstacles to the exercise of the arts on which the existence of civilized peoples is founded. It is possible that the soil there is more or less absolutely resistant to the labors of agriculture, that manufacturing and commerce could only with difficulty make progress there, that the sciences which relate to the exercise of these arts are for that very reason impossible there, that the coarseness and violence of morals there correspond to the forced barbarism of minds; it is possible, in a word, that the nature of the country is more or less opposed to all those developments that permit a people to dispose with ease and with extent of its forces, and which properly constitute liberty.

However, let us admit that the Tartars are not slaves, as Montesquieu says, because they have no cities, no forests, few marshes; and that there is no city, forest, nor marsh that could make a free people out of an uncultivated people like the Tartars.

Let us also admit that pastoral peoples are not free because they are wandering and vagabond: when hunger, cold, diseases, and war, more murderous still, came to assail in their migration the Kalmyks who had departed from the banks of the Volga to go form a new establishment in China, the great number of those who succumbed probably did not find that the wandering life was very favorable to liberty [^126] .

Nomadic peoples are no freer for being ignorant: the ignorant man does not know how to take advantage of his forces, and it is a poor way to prove a man's liberty to say that he can make no use of his faculties.

Nor are they so for being intemperate: intemperance, which wears out and depraves our organs, is surely a bad means of facilitating their play, of extending and of strengthening their exercise.

[^105]: Voyage de Cook, t. I, p. 119. [^106]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. II, sect. II. [^107]: Voyage de Cook, t. I, p. 119, 120, 121, 122. [^108]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. I, sect. I. [^109]: Histoire de l'Amérique, by Robertson, t. II, p. 81. [^110]: Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes, by Péron, t. I, p. 469. [^111]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. I, sect. III. [^112]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. II, sect. II. [^113]: Voyage de Cook, t. I, p. 127. [^114]: Histoire de l'Amérique, by Robertson, t. II, p. 101. [^115]: Histoire de l'Amérique, by Robertson, t. II, p. 102. [^116]: Voyage de Cook, t. I, p. 127. [^117]: Histoire de l'Amérique, by Robertson, t. II, p. 121. [^118]: The word nomad comes from a Greek word which signifies to pasture. It is applied to peoples who live by the product of their herds. [^119]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVIII, chap. XI. [^120]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVIII, chap. XIX. [^121]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVIII, chap. XIX. [^122]: Observations sur l'histoire de France, by Mably, liv. I, chap. I. [^123]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVIII, chap. XXVIII. [^124]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVII, chap. VI. [^125]: Esprit des Lois, liv. XVIII, chap. I. [^126]: See the account of this migration in the Lettres édifiantes.Nor are they so because they are proud and brutal: the brutality of the nomad, if it sometimes makes him impatient of domination, habitually disposes him to violence, and violence is certainly a bad means of liberty.

Nor are they so because they do not cultivate the land, because they produce nothing, and live only by plunder: every pillaging people is threatened with pillage. Montesquieu, speaking of the ravages that the wandering hordes of Germania came to exercise in the Roman empire, says that the destroyers were ceaselessly destroyed [^127]; their destruction was therefore the natural consequence of their way of life. This result does not indicate that it was very favorable to their liberty.

Thus, all that Montesquieu and Mably say to establish that nomadic peoples are free, proves quite the contrary that they are not. Men who do not cultivate the land, who exercise no art, who are ignorant, debauched, violent, could not be free men. There can be no true liberty but in the bosom of countries where one possesses industry and enlightenment, and where one knows how to bend one’s forces to the rules of morality and equity.

§ 3. If, thus taking liberty in its true sense, I now wish to seek that which pastoral peoples enjoy, I will be led to recognize that they are a little more free than the savage nations. In effect, their mind does not move in so narrow a circle; they know how to make a little more extended use of their natural faculties; they know better how to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves; their food is at once healthier, more abundant, and less precarious; their clothing is also better, and one sees none absolutely naked; finally, the tent of the nomad, however crude it may be, is nonetheless better than the hut of the savage.

I have said that one sometimes perceives among hunting peoples feeble beginnings of agriculture; one finds them with a little more extension among certain pastoral peoples. These peoples begin to make use of metals; they have subjugated several species of animals, and have bent them to various sorts of services. Their manufacturing industry is a little more advanced than that of hunting peoples: they construct carts; they fabricate better weapons; they felt wool, spin it, and weave a few crude cloths. They also have more extended notions than savages of commerce, exchanges, and calculation. Finally, as they are in general more industrious, they do not find themselves under the yoke of such cruel necessities: they do not kill, for example, a part of their children, for want of being able to feed them all; if a mother happens to die during the period of nursing, they do not believe themselves obliged to suffocate on her breast the fruit of her womb; finally, as they possess some means of transport, they can, in their frequent emigrations, carry with them their old parents, and it does not appear that they are ever reduced to regarding parricide as a good office [^128].

Nomadic peoples therefore know how to make a little more extended use of their faculties than savage peoples. On the other hand, they know how to make a little better regulated use of them with regard to themselves: habitually less famished, they do not eat, on occasion, with the same excess of intemperance; their drunkenness has perhaps something less brutal about it; their fatigues being less extreme, they are less inclined to laziness; their rest does not offer the same character of apathy and stupidity. They are therefore in general more disposed, more masters of themselves; and, from this second point of view, they can use their forces with more liberty.

Finally, nomadic peoples begin to put some calculation into their relations with other men, and, in this respect also, they are superior to hunting peoples. The savage made war only to exterminate his enemies: the nomad does not always propose to destroy them; he is capable of conceiving the thought of enslaving them, and this itself, a singular thing! is a progress towards liberty. The interest which, at this age of civilization, already persuades man to no longer massacre his prisoners, will later persuade him to no longer make war, and will by degrees give a less violent and less destructive tendency to his activity. One is therefore already closer to being free. One is even already freer in fact: as murder and devastation are no longer the sole end of war, it is perhaps not waged with the same degree of exaltation and fury; it does not excite such violent, such implacable resentments [^129]: there is therefore a little more security; liberty also suffers less from the immediate consequences of war; for, whatever be the misfortunes of servitude, it is still better to be taken to be reduced to slavery, than to be taken to be attached to a stake, mutilated, torn, burned, devoured; and an enslaved man, however enslaved he may be, is nonetheless freer than a dead man. Whether, therefore, one considers nomadic peoples in their relations with things, with themselves, with their fellow men, one finds that they make of their faculties a use a little less limited, less stupid, less disordered, less violent than savage peoples, and that in consequence they enjoy, in all these respects, a little more liberty.

§ 4. However, these progresses are still far from being very perceptible; and, when I say that they make a use of their forces a little less blind and less carried away, I do not mean to say assuredly that they use them in a very enlightened and very moral manner. Although lodged, fed, and clothed a little less miserably than hunting peoples, they still know how to provide only very imperfectly for the first necessities of physical life. The ancient Scythians, according to Justin [^130], had for their only lodging carts covered with skins. This is still the only shelter of most Tartar peoples. The Germans knew how to employ in the construction of their habitations neither stone, nor brick, nor cement, nor lime: their dwellings were but low and crude huts, constructed of unfashioned wood, covered with thatch, and pierced at their summit to allow smoke a free passage. Sometimes they even had for asylum only obscure underground passages, which they covered with a thick layer of manure [^131].

The clothing of pastoral peoples is still cruder than their dwellings. If they are not in a state of absolute nudity, like several savage peoples, they are in general uncovered over more than half of the body. Tacitus and Caesar agree in saying that the Germans had, to defend themselves against the rigor of the cold, only a light mantle formed of the skin of some animal, which they fixed on the shoulders with a clasp and more often with a thorn, and which left the greater part of their body bare [^132]. The tunic that most German women added to this garment was but a sort of sack of coarse cloth, which veiled neither their legs nor their arms, and which left the whole upper part of their chest uncovered [^133].

Pastoral nations find a healthy and substantial food in the milk and flesh of the flocks of which they make their principal nourishment; but the easier this nourishment is to obtain, the more rapidly the population rises to the level of this feeble means of subsistence, and, when they have exhausted this resource, they know how to supplement it only very imperfectly: they draw almost nothing from the soil by culture. Besides the fact that the countries they inhabit are generally little suited to it, they are still more diverted from devoting themselves to it by their laziness and by the ferocity of their morals than by the aridity of the soil. The Usbecks of Great Bucharia, says the author of the Genealogical History of the Tartars, are excited neither by the singular fertility of their country, nor by the prosperity of those who cultivate it, to devote themselves to the peaceful arts of agriculture and commerce [^134]. The Germans, according to Tacitus, responded hardly better to the fertility of their country: they made it produce very little wheat [^135], and all the fruits they ate were wild [^136].

Besides, the laziness and coarseness of pastoral peoples are not the only cause that halts the progress of their agriculture; it is also halted by their continual displacements, which do not permit them to make any accumulation, to give any sequence to their labors; it is halted above all by their eternal depredations, which leave the laborer no hope of reaping the fruit of his pains [^137]; it is halted finally by the very precautions they sometimes take to prevent it from making too much progress, from softening their morals, and from ending by disgusting them with brigandage. It is in this spirit that the Germans made a new division of the soil every year [^138]. They feared, says Caesar, that the charms of property would finally make them quit war and arms for the sweet occupations of culture [^139].

In sum, peoples, at this second age of civilization, still execute only singularly crude labors. To form an idea of the imperfection of their arts, it suffices to say that they are ignorant of writing [^140], and that in general money is lacking in their exchanges, and iron in their industry [^141]. Thus they are excessively miserable. The common run of Bedouins, says M. de Volney, live in a habitual state of misery and famine. The frugality of the Arabs, he adds, is not a virtue of choice; it is commanded of them by the necessity of the circumstances in which they find themselves [^142]. The Calmoucks, according to Pallas, were dying of hunger in the midst of the fertile steppes of the Volga; the men of the lowest classes there were plunged in the most profound misery. They were habitually reduced to making use of all species of animals, plants, and roots that could furnish them some food: worn-out or wounded horses, beasts dead of disease, provided they had not succumbed to any contagious malady, were for them a veritable feast. They went so far as to eat animals that had fallen into putrefaction; and such was the distress of the most miserable, that they were sometimes reduced, to deceive their hunger, to devour the droppings of cattle [^143].

§ 5. If nomadic peoples still provide so poorly for their needs, they hardly know any better how to regulate their appetites, and the coarseness of their industry is reproduced in their morals. Deprived of all the arts that could occupy their leisure, they pass in eating or sleeping the time that is not filled by the violent exercises of war or the hunt; slaves guard their flocks, their women attend to domestic labors, and they rest. The more profound their idleness, the more they need strong emotions to emerge from their torpor, and it is from their very indolence that their most fiery passions are born [^144]. They give themselves over without any measure to the excesses of drink and of gambling. The Germans had such an unbridled taste for intoxicating liquors, that it was as easy, according to Tacitus, to destroy them by drink as by war [^145]. They placed their glory in remaining for entire days at table, and the drunkenness into which they plunged was so brutal, that it was rare not to see these parties of debauchery end in bloody brawls [^146]. Such, finally, was the happiness they found in satisfying their passion for fermented liquors, that they saw none sweeter to promise to their warriors after a glorious death; and several of their tribes had imagined a sort of crude paradise where the heroes were to get drunk for eternal life [^147].

A single trait suffices to show with what impetuosity they gave themselves over to gambling. When they had lost everything, they gambled themselves, says Tacitus; and these indomitable characters, who could not suffer any check, even to their violences, put their liberty and their person at the hazard of a throw of the dice [^148].

Nomadic peoples, although less unhappy than savages, seem to be still much too exposed to misery to be very inclined to the pleasures of love; however, it is far from being the case that they have, in this regard, severe morals, and even that they are capable of imposing any restraint on their desires. Among the most frequent causes of their quarrels, one can place the abductions of women. They ordinarily marry several, and surround themselves, when they can, with an unlimited number of concubines. Tacitus, in saying that the Germans contented themselves with a single wife, observes that they were the only barbarians who showed in this regard so much restraint [^149]. Yet the exception among them was not general, nor perhaps very real; and judicious writers have thought that, in his praise of the continence of the Germans, Tacitus had let himself be carried away a little by the noble pleasure of opposing the purity of crude shepherds to the dissolute morals of Roman ladies [^150].

One finds therefore in the private habits of pastoral peoples most of the vices of savage nations; and, although these vices do not perhaps have among them the same degree of violence and brutality, it is not doubtful that their faculties are greatly altered by them, and that their liberty receives grave injuries from them.

§ 6. Let us add here that their liberty has no less to suffer from the excesses to which they give themselves over toward one another, than from those into which they fall with regard to themselves. Their life, in the relations of people to people, is but a tissue of horrible violences, and the use they make of their forces in the interior of each tribe is not, in many respects, more moderate.

Although women, among them, are not treated with the same degree of contempt and harshness as among savage peoples, they are still there in a profound state of dependence and debasement. While their husbands can have several wives and make concubines of all their captives, the slightest infidelity on their part would expose them to rigorous punishments. Upon them weigh all the labors of domestic life: they pitch the tents, make the felt that is to cover them, prepare the furs that will serve as mantles for their husbands, prepare their meal, serve it to them, and are not admitted to share it, perform in all respects the office of slaves, are finally subjected, as are their children, to an authority that knows no limits, and which the husband sometimes abuses to the point of selling as slaves the mother and the children [^151].

Here, as I have said, the prisoners are not always massacred, but they are then enslaved, and it is not a sweet destiny to be the slave of a Moor, of an Arab, of a Tartar. Fergusson cites the remark of a Greek who preferred, he said, to be a slave of the Scythians than a citizen of Rome [^152]. This Greek was making too strong a satire of Rome. I do not believe that the lot of the Romans was ever very worthy of envy; but there was surely still a great distance from the condition of a Roman citizen to that of the slave of a barbarian. Tacitus, who strives to attenuate the evils suffered among the Germans by the men chained to the soil, recognizes however that their masters, in a fit of anger, could with impunity take their lives [^153].

Here then among pastoral peoples are several classes of persons, women, children, slaves, who live under the absolute empire of violence and force. The warrior himself is not sheltered there from all subjection. His superstitious terrors deliver him defenseless to the despotism of his priests; and, on the other hand, the necessity of discipline, in the midst of the eternal wars in which he is engaged, forces him to submit almost blindly to the will of his generals. The German, who would not bend under any sort of human justice, let himself be patiently beaten with rods by the minister of the god of battles [^154]. The Tartar, who habitually recognizes no sort of authority, swears, when he unites with his khan for some military expedition, to go wherever he sends him, to arrive as soon as he calls him, to kill whomever he designates to him, to consider henceforth his word as a sword [^155]: he no longer places any bounds on his dependence.

Finally, while in the interior of the camp everyone undergoes some sort of arbitrary subjection, the entire horde is in continual peril of being assailed, pillaged, enslaved. This is the very natural consequence of the violences it ceaselessly commits, of the permanent state of hostility in which it lives with other tribes. Man, at this age of society, is still but an animal of prey; the nations are but bands of thieves. The universal occupation is to seek where one can find booty to be made, and to devise by what means one will most surely succeed in seizing it [^156].

Fergusson wishes that liberty not be incompatible with such an order of things.

“In ages of barbarism,” he says, “men lack neither security for their persons nor for their property. Each, it is true, has enemies; but each also has friends; and if one runs the risk of being attacked, one is sure of being aided [^157].”

[^127]: Esprit des Lois, book XVII, chap. 6. [^128]: Histoire générale des voyages, vol. XI, p. 176. [^129]: Histoire générale des voyages, vol. XI, p. 176. [^130]: Hist., book II, chap. 2. [^131]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 16. [^132]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 17. — Caesar, De bello Gall., book VI, chap. 21. [^133]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 17. [^134]: Histoire généalogique des Tartares, part V, chap. 12. [^135]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 26. [^136]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 23. [^137]: Histoire générale des voyages, vol. XI, p. 176. [^138]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 26. [^139]: Caesar, De bello Gall., book VI, chap. 22. [^140]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 19. [^141]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 5. [^142]: Voyage en Syrie, vol. I, p. 396. [^143]: Voyages en diverses provinces de l'empire de Russie, vol. I, p. 556. [^144]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, part II, sect. 2. [^145]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 22. [^146]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 22. [^147]: Mallet, Introduction à l'histoire du Danemarck. [^148]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 24. [^149]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 18. [^150]: Gibbon, Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, chap. 9. [^151]: Histoire généalogique des Tartares, part II, chap. 10. [^152]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, part II, sect. 2. [^153]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 25. [^154]: Tacitus, De moribus German., chap. 7. [^155]: Histoire généalogique des Tartares, part II, chap. 10. [^156]: Histoire générale des voyages, vol. XI, p. 176. [^157]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, part II, sect. 2.This reasoning is a pure sophism. It is truly insensate to thus place security in the midst of war and alarms; one might as well say that, on a battlefield, there is also safety for persons and for property. Indeed, if one has enemies before him, is one not surrounded by one's friends, and if the attack is imminent, is not the defense assured? Yet who would dare say that one is in safety on a battlefield? Well! one is no more so in the social state I am describing. The earth, at this age of civilization, is but a vast field of war where men are perpetually at grips, where each is, by turns, assailant or assailed, pillager or pillaged, murderer or murdered, master or slave. There is no safety in Arabia, even for the Arab shepherds [^158] . The Tartars exterminate one another in the bosom of their deserts; the Germans, the Normans, all the hordes of barbarians who, at different epochs, hurled themselves from the north of Europe upon the south, enjoyed no safety in the course of their depredations and their ravages: the destroyers, as Montesquieu says, were perpetually destroyed.

§ 7. Although, then, pastoral peoples, considered in their industrial labors, and in their personal and social morals, are a little more advanced than hunting peoples, it is certain that, in all these respects, they still make a very crude and very violent use of their faculties, and that at this age of social life, consequently, man can as yet enjoy only a very imperfect liberty.

§ 8. I must add that the principle of the violence and brutality of pastoral peoples is in the very manner in which they provide for their needs, in their state as pastoral nations. Although the earth, in this new state, can nourish a few more inhabitants than under the economic regime of hunting peoples, the quantity of food it can produce is still excessively limited, and men, as in the first age of civilization, are invincibly drawn to struggle for their subsistence.

The pastoral life has this particularity, that it is of all modes of existence the one where man obtains with the most facility the resources proper to each manner of living. The hunter ordinarily finds and reaches his prey only with great effort; the farmer makes his field fecund only with great pains: the shepherd, on the contrary, gathers almost without fatigue what his pastures and his herds can give him. This manner of living is therefore that in which must be produced and renewed most easily, not a very strong population, but a population superior to the means of existence, an excess population [^159] . Consequently, it is that in which the population must most often feel the need to leave the country, to form warlike enterprises. Other causes still foment in it this spirit of conquest and emigration: the kind of industry on which its subsistence is founded is very well reconciled with the necessities of military life; its herds, which serve as its food, also serve as its vehicle; it transports itself by the same means that it feeds itself, and the principle of its enterprises is in the same source as that of its life; moreover, it is always assembled, it is armed, it is idle, its idleness bores it, famine goads it, the sight of its united forces and the habit it has of moving in a mass excite its confidence and its audacity... It is therefore irresistibly pushed to brigandage, to war, to invasions.

Hence those formidable irruptions of the pastoral peoples of the North toward the South, at an epoch when the South was still only very weakly populated, and the excessive facility with which these peoples repaired their losses and recommenced their attacks [^160] . The end of their invasions was seen only when they had successively occupied the most beautiful countries of the earth, when they had established themselves there, when a certain degree of civilization had there developed their forces, and when the last to arrive of these peoples finally found before them populations too numerous and too powerful to be able to attempt to destroy or dislodge them [^161] . Now, and for several centuries, any new enterprise of this kind has become decidedly impossible for them, and the rest of these barbarous hordes find themselves forever confined in the burning deserts of Africa, or in the highest and coldest regions of Asia. But the same causes continue to produce similar effects among them; and henceforth too weak to be able to attack civilized nations, they consume the excess of their population in their mutual and ceaselessly recurring quarrels.

War is therefore the inevitable consequence of the imperfect mode of subsistence adopted by pastoral peoples. To finish making felt how well-founded this remark is, it suffices to say that among the Arabs, tradition has preserved, for the times prior to Muhammad alone, the memory of seventeen hundred battles, and to recall that annual truce of two months that they observed with a religious fidelity, and which characterized with still more force, as Gibbon observes, their constant habits of anarchy and hostility [^162] .

If war is a forced thing in the pastoral life, ignorance and excesses of every kind which oppose the development of liberty are, in their turn, inevitable consequences of war. The barbarian, who believes he improves his lot by pillage, only halts all production, and renders himself more and more miserable. Misery, in growing, fortifies his penchant for rapine, and makes him ever more incapable of making a useful employment of his forces. His incurable laziness is born, like his ignorance, of his violent exercises; his intemperance and his debaucheries are born, in their turn, of his laziness: all his vices are thus the consequence of his social state. The slavery of his servants, that of his wife; his disputes, his bloody brawls, his political and religious dependence flow from the same source. It is because he makes war that he needs to submit to the arbitrary will of another; it is because he makes war that he is ignorant, consequently superstitious, consequently under the yoke of his priests; it is because he makes war that he wishes to settle all his quarrels as they are settled in war, that is to say, by force of arms; it is because he makes war, and because war makes him lazy and brutal, that he neglects all useful labors, and casts the burden of them upon the beings least capable of bearing it. Finally, all that is crude in his mind and in his morals is born of his habitual state of war, which, for its part, is the in some sense obligatory accompaniment of the pastoral state.

§ 9. However, one finds again in this state the germs of liberty that I have pointed out in the one that precedes, and, as I said at first, one finds them there more developed. There is a little more industry, a little more instruction, a little less ferocity; one enters into composition for injuries and for murder; one mistreats women less; one does not always exterminate prisoners, and it never happens that one devours them, as is sometimes practiced in the preceding age.

Only, as the perils and evils are less great, the morals are no longer quite so fierce, and it seems that the sentiment of individual independence has already lost something of its fierce energy. However savage was the virtue of those Cimbrian women, who, at the moment of a rout, strove to save their kin from servitude by death, suffocated their children with their own hands, trampled them under the feet of horses, and ended by killing themselves [^163] , there is yet a great distance from this frenzy to the fanatical obstinacy of that savage who, tied to the fatal stake, suffers, rather than admit himself vanquished, the most frightful tortures; who, for any danger of nearby death, does not relax a single point of his assurance, and who expires, as Montaigne says, while making a face at his executioners [^164] .

§ 10. We are now going to see what becomes of these progresses among sedentary peoples; and, proceeding in order, we will first examine what liberty is compatible with the manner of living of those of these peoples who live off the labor of enslaved men.

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Notes

[^119]: Spir. of the Laws, book 18, ch. 14. [^120]: Spir. of the Laws, book 18, ch. 19. [^121]: ibid. [^122]: Observat. on the hist. of France, vol. I, p. 158; duodecimo, 1782. [^123]: Spirit of the Laws, book 18: of laws in the relation they bear to the nature of the soil. Chap. 18 of the same book: of the long hair of the Frankish kings. [^124]: Book 17, ch. 6. [^125]: Book 18, ch. 1. [^126]: See the Voyage of Benj. Bergmann among the Kalmyks. [^127]: Spirit of the Laws, book 18, ch. 4. [^128]: See in Péron, vol. I, p. 468 et seq., how frequent these excesses are in savage life. They are no longer tolerated in nomadic life: “Numerum liberorum finire, aut quemquam ex agnatis necare flagitium habetur.” (“To limit the number of children, or to kill any of the later-born, is held to be a crime.”) (Tac. Manners of the Germ., ch. 19.) [^130]: Book 2, ch. 2. [^131]: Tac. Manners of the Germ., ch. 16. [^132]: Manners of the Germans, ch. 17. — Gallic Wars, b. 6. [^133]: Manners of the Germ., ch. 11. [^134]: Volume II, p. 455. [^135]: Manners of the Germ., ch. 26. [^136]: Ib., ch. 23 and 26. [^137]: “It is less the richness of the soil than a certain degree of security,” Malthus judiciously observes, “that can encourage a people to pass from pastoral to agricultural life. When this security does not exist, the sedentary cultivator is more exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune than one who leads a wandering life and takes all his property with him. Under the government of the Turks, at once weak and oppressive, it is not rare to see peasants abandon their villages to embrace pastoral life, in the hope of more easily escaping the pillage of their masters and that of their neighbors.” (Ess. on the Principle of Pop., vol. I, p. 177.) [^138]: Arva per annos mutant... (“They change their cultivated fields annually...”) Tacitus, Manners of the Germans, Ch. 26. [^139]: De Bello Gallico, book 6, ch. 21. [^140]: Litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminæ ignorant. (“The secrets of letters are unknown to men and women alike.”) Tac., Manners of the Germ., ch. 19. [^141]: Id., ch. 5 and 6. [^142]: Travels in Syria, vol. I, p. 339. [^143]: Pallas, Travels in Russia, vol. III, pp. 272 to 274. [^144]: There is not, in this regard, in their morals, the contradiction that Tacitus believes he remarks there (Manners of the Germ., ch. 15). The indolence and impetuosity of the Germans were two excesses that arise from one another, and which both stemmed from the way of life of these peoples. [^145]: Ib., ch. 23. [^146]: Ib., ch. 22. [^147]: The Edda, fab. 20, transl. by Mallet, introd. to the history of Denmark. [^148]: Manners of the Germans, ch. 24. [^149]: Manners of the Germ., ch. 18. [^150]: Gibb., vol. II, p. 76. — Voltaire, Essay on Morals, vol. I, p. 218. “Tacitus,” says Voltaire, “praises the morals of the Germans, as Horace sang of those of the barbarians, named Getae. Both were ignorant of what they praised, and only wanted to satirize Rome. The same Tacitus, in the midst of his praises, admits that the Germans preferred to live by plunder than to cultivate the land, and that after having pillaged their neighbors, they spent their time eating and sleeping. This is the life of today's highway robbers and purse-cutters. And this is what Tacitus has the audacity to praise...” [^151]: Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Pop., vol. 1, p. 173 of the transl. - Among the Barbarians, says Aristotle, the woman and the slave are confounded in the same class (Polit. book 1 ch. 1, § 5). Each, absolute master of his sons and his wives, gives laws to them all... (Homer, cited by Arist. ib., § 7; transl. by M. Thurot.) [^152]: Ferguson, Essay on the Hist. of Civ. Soc., p. 161; Basel ed., Engl. [^153]: Manners of the Germ., ch. 25. [^154]: Ib., ch. 7. [^156]: Ib., pp. 150 and 151. [^157]: Ferguson, p. 162. “In the rude ages, the persons and properties of individuals are secure; because each has a friend, as well as an ennemy; and if the one is dispose to molest, the other is ready to protect.” [^158]: See the animated picture that Gibbon, vol. X of his history, paints of the furious and interminable dissensions of the Bedouin Arabs. [^159]: These are two very different things, as Malthus shows very well. There can be an excess of population in the least populated countries: it is enough for there to be more men than provisions. [^160]: It is this facility with which a certain population renews and displaces itself in pastoral life that for so long led to the supposition that the North was formerly more populated than it is today. Knowledge of the true principles of population allowed Malthus to victoriously refute this error. He proves without difficulty that the North, at a time when it was still covered with woods and marshes, could not have contained a very numerous population; but at the same time he shows that the population there must have risen rapidly to the level of the means of subsistence, and soon furnished the enterprising spirit of the barbarians with the means to attempt new expeditions, which, in their turn, left a clear field for new generations, and prepared from afar for new invasions. (See his work, vol. I, ch. 6.) [^161]: During the course of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, the nations of Europe today reputed the most powerful in arms and industry had been delivered as if defenseless to the constant depredations of the Normans. “At last,” says Malthus, “they grew in strength, and succeeded in taking from the peoples of the North all hope of success in their future invasions. The latter yielded slowly and with reluctance to necessity, and learned to confine themselves within their own limits. They gradually exchanged their pastoral life as well as the taste for pillage and the habit of migrations, for the patient labors of commerce and agriculture, which, by accustoming them to less rapid profits, imperceptibly changed their morals and their character.” (Essay on the Princ. of Pop., vol. I, p. 155 et seq. of the Fr. transl.) [^162]: Hist. of the Dec. of the Rom. Emp., vol. X of the transl., Guizot ed. [^163]: Plutarch, Life of Marius; and Tacitus, Manners of the Germ., ch. 7 and 8. [^164]: ESSAYS, Of Cannibals.