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."
