by the members of the ancient parliament and by the Sorbonne, natural philosophers of distinguished eminence, and who, it is well known, have admirably promoted the perfection of the arts. Our instinct, tn the first place, impels us to beat our brother when he vexes us, if we are roused into a passion with him and feel that we are stronger than he is. Afterwards, our sublime reasons lead us on to the invention of arrows, swords, pikes, and at length musquets, to kill our neighbours withal. Instinct alone urges us all to make love"Amor omnibus idem;" but Virgil, Tibullus, and Ovid sing it. It is from instinct alone that a young artisan stands gazing with respect and admiration before the superfine gilt coach of a commissioner of taxes. Reason comes to the assistance of the young artisan; he is made a collector; he becomes polished; he embezzles; he rises to be a great man in his turn, and dazzles the eyes of his former comrades as he lolls at ease in his own carriage, more profusely gilded than that which originally excited his admiration and ambition. > and looks with an eye of pity on the man who will be admitted only into the ninth. The interest of the Malabar widow, who burns herself with the corpse of her husband, is to recover him in another world, and be there more happy even than the fakir. For, together with their metempsychosis, the Indians have another world; they resemble ourselves; their system admits of contradictions. Were you ever acquainted with any king or republic that made either war or peace, that issued decrees, or entered into conventions, from any other motive than that of interest? With respect to the interest of money, consult, in the great Encyclopedia, the article of M. d'Alembert, on Calculation, and that of M. Boucher d'Argis on Jurisprudence. We will venture to add a few reflections. 1. Are gold and silver merchandize? Yes; the author of the Spirit of Laws does not think so when he says:"Money, which is the price of commodities, is hired and not bought." It is both lent and bought. I buy gold with silver, and silver with gold; What is this instinct which governs the and their price fluctuates in all commerwhole animal kingdom, and which in uscial countries from day to day. is strengthened by reason or repressed by habit? Is it "divinæ particula auræ ?" Yes, undoubtedly it is something divine; for everything is so. Everything is the incomprehensible effect of an incomprehensible cause. Everything is swayed, is impelled by nature. We reason about everything, and originate nothing. INTEREST. WE shall teach mankind nothing, when we tell them that everything we do is done from interest. What! it will be said, is it from motives of interest that the wretched fakir remains stark-naked under the burning sun, loaded with chains, dying with hunger, half devoured by vermin, and devouring them in his turn? Yes, most undoubtedly it is; as we have stated elsewhere, he depends upon ascending to the eighteenth heaven, The law of Holland requires bills of exchange to be paid in the silver coin of the country, and not in gold, if the creditor demands it. Then I buy silver money, and I pay for it in gold, or in cloth, corn, or diamonds. I am in want of money, corn, or diamonds, for the space of a year; the corn, money, or diamond merchant says-İ could, for this year, sell my money, corn, or diamonds to advantage. Let us estimate at four, five, or six per cent, according to the usage of the country, what I should lose by letting you have it. You shall, for instance, return me at the end of the year, twenty-one carats of diamonds for the twenty which I now lend you; twenty-one sacks of corn for the twenty; twenty-one thousand crowns for twenty thousand crowns. Such is interest. It is established among all THE DUTCHMAN. That is clear all the world ought to be Jews; but it seems to me, that the law permitted the Hebrew horde to gain as much usury as they could from fo nations by the law of nature. The maximum or highest rate of interest depends, in every country, on its own particular law. At Rome money is lent on pledges at two and a half per cent. according to law, and the pledges are sold, if the mo-reigners, and that, in consequence of this ney be not paid at the appointed time. permission, they managed their affairs in I do not lend upon pledges, and I re- the sequel remarkably well. Besides, quire only the interest customary in Hol- the prohibition against one Jew's taking land. If I was in China, I should ask interest from another must necessarily of you the customary interest at Macao have become obsolete, since our Lord and Canton. Jesus, when preaching at Jerusalem, ex2. While the parties were proceeding pressly said, that interest was in his time with this bargain at Amsterdam, it hap-cent. per cent for in the parable of the pened that there arrived from St. Mag-talents he says, that the servant who had liore, a Jansenist, (and the fact is perfectly received five talents gained five others in true, he was called the Abbé des Issarts); Jerusalem by them; that he who had this Jansenist says to the Dutch mer- two gained two by them; and that the chant, "Take care what you are about; third who had only one, and did not turn you are absolutely incurring damnation; that to any account, was shut up in a money must not produce money, 'num-dungeon by his master, for not laying it mus nummum non parit.' No one is allowed to receive interest for his money but when he is willing to sink the principal. The way to be saved is, to make a contract with the gentleman; and for twenty thousand crowns which you are never to have returned to you, you and your heirs will receive a thousand crowns per annum to all eternity." "You jest," replies the Dutchman; "you are in this very case proposing to me a usury that is absolutely of the nature of an infinite series. I should (that is myself and heirs would) in that case receive back my capital at the end of twenty years, the double of it in forty, the four-fold of it in eighty; this you see would be just an infinite series. I cannot, besides, lend for more than twelve months, and I am contented with a thousand crowns as a remuneration." THE ABBE DES ISSARTS. I am grieved for your Dutch soul, God forbade the Jews to lend at interest, and you are well aware that a citizen of Amsterdam should punctually obey the laws of commerce given in a wilderness to runaway vagrants who had no com Inerce. out with the money-changers. But these money-changers were Jews; it was therefore between Jews that usury was practised at Jerusalem; therefore this parable, drawn from the circumstances and manners of the times, decidedly indicates that usury or interest was at the rate of cent. per cent. Read the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew; he was conversant with the subject; he had been a commissioner of taxes in Galilee. Let me finish my agreement with this gentleman; and do not make me lose both my money and my time. THE ABBE DES ISSARTS. All that you say is very good and very fine; but the Sorbonne has decided, that lending money on interest is a mortal sin. THE DUTCHMAN. You must be laughing at me, my good friend, when you cite the Sorbonne as an authority to a merchant of Amsterdam. There is not a single individual among those wrangling railers themselves who does not obtain, whenever he can, five or six per cent. for his money by purchasing revenue bills, India bonds, assignments, and Canada bills. The clergy of France, as a corporate body, borrow at interest. In many of the provinces of France, it is the custom to stipulate for interest with the principal. Besides, the university of Oxford and that of Salamanca have decided against the Sorbonne. I acquired this information in the course of my travels; and thus we have authority against authority. Once more, I must beg you to interrupt me no longer. THE ABBE DES ISSARTS. The wicked, sir, are never at a loss for reasons. You are, I repeat, absolutely destroying yourself, for the Abbé de St. Cyran, who has not performed any miracles, and the Abbé Paris, who performed some in St. Medard. 3. Before the abbé had finished his speech, the merchant drove him out of his counting-house; and after having legally lent his money, to the last penny, went to represent the conversation between himself and the abbé to the magistrates, who forbade the Jansenists from propagating a doctrine so pernicious to commerce. Gentlemen, said the chief bailiff, give us of efficacious grace as much as you please, of predestination as much as you please, and of communion as little as you please; on these points you are masters; but take care not to meddle with the laws of commerce. INTOLERANCE. READ the article "Intolerance" in the great Encyclopedia. Read the treatise on toleration composed on occasion of the dreadful assassination of John Calas, a citizen of Thoulouse; and if, after that, you allow of persecution in matters of religion, compare yourself at once to Ravaillac. Ravaillac, you know, was highly intolerant. The following is the substance of all the discourses ever delivered by the intolerant. You monster! who will be burnt to all eternity in the other world, and whom I will myself burn as soon as ever I can in this; you really have the insolence to read De Thou and Bayle, who have been put into the index of prohibited authors at Rome! When I was preaching to you in the name of God, how Sampson had killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, your head, still harder than the arsenal from which Sampson obtained his arms, showed me by a slight movement from left to right that you believed nothing of what I said. And when I stated, that the devil Asmodeus, who out of jealousy twisted the necks of the seven husbands of Sarah among the Medes, was put in chains in Upper Egypt, I saw a small contraction of your lips, in Latin called cachinnus (a grin) which plainly indicated to me, that in the bottom of your soul you held the history of Asmodeus in derision. And as for you, Isaac Newton; Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburgh; John Locke ; Catherine, Empress of Russia, victorious over the Ottomans; Join Milton; the beneficent Sovereign of Denmark; Shakspeare; the wise King of Sweden; Leibnitz; the august house of Brunswick: Tillotson; the Emperor of China; the parliament of England; the Council of the great Mogul ; in short, all you who do not believe one word which I have taught in my courses on divinity, I declare to you, that I regard you all as pagans and publicans, as, in order to engrave it on your unimpressible brains, I have often told you before. You are a set of callous miscreants; you will all go the gehennah were the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; for I am right, and you are all wrong; and I have grace and you have none. I confess three devotees in my neighbourhood, while you do not confess a single one; I have executed the mandates of bishops, which has never been the case with you; I have abused philosophers in the language of the fish-market, while you have protected, imitated, or equalled them; I have composed pious defamatory libels, stuffed with infamous calumnies, and you have never so much as read them. I say mass every day in Latin for fourteen sous, and you are never even so much as present at it, any more than Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar, Horace, or Virgil, were ever present at it;-consequently you deserve each of you to have your right hand cut off, your tongue cut out, to be put to the torture, and at last burnt at a slow fire; for God is merciful. Such, without the slightest abatement, are the maxims of the intolerant, and the suin and substance of all their books. How delightful to live with such amiable people! INUNDATION. Was there ever a time when the globe was entirely inundated? It is physically impossible. by the laws of fluids, and by the insufficient quantity of water for the purpose. We do not however, by these observa{tions, at all mean to impeach the truth of the universal deluge, related in the Pentateuch; on the contrary, that is a miracle which it is our duty to believe; it is a miracle, and therefore could not have been accomplished by the laws of nature. All is miracle in the history of the deluge a miracle, that forty days of rain should have inundated the four quarters of the world, and have raised the water to the height of fifteen cubits above the tops of the loftiest mountains; a miracle, that there should have been cataracts, floodgates, and openings in heaven; a miracle, that all sorts of animals should have been collected in the ark from all parts of the world; a miracle that Noah found the means of feeding them for a period of ten months; a miracle, that all the animals with all their provisions could have been included and retained in the ark; a miracle, that the greater part of them did not die; a miracle, that after quitting the ark, they found food enough to maintain them; and a further miracle, but of a different kind, that a person, of the name of Pelletier, thought himself capable of explaining how all the animals could be contained and fed in { Noah's ark naturally, that is, without a miracle. It is possible that the sea may successively have covered every land, one part after another; and even this can only have happened by very slow gradation, and in a prodigious number of centuries. In the course of five hundred years the sea has retired from Aigues-Mortes, Frejus, and Ravenna, which were considerable ports, and left about two leagues of land dry. According to the ratio of such progression, it is clear that it would require two million and two hundred and fifty thousand years to produce the same effect through the whole circuit of the globe. It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that this period of time nearly falls in with that which the axis of the earth would require to be raised, so as to coincide with the equator; a change extremely probable, which began to be considered so only about fifty years since, and which could not be completed in a shorter period of time than two mil-tempt an explanation of it: it is one of lion and three hundred thousand years. The beds or strata of shells, which have been discovered at the distance of some leagues from the sea, are an incontestible evidence that it has gradually deposited these marine productions on tracts which were formerly shores of the ocean; but that the water should have ever covered the whole globe at once, is an absurd chimera in physics, demonstrated to be impossible by the laws of gravitation, VOL. II.-68 But the history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness to at the mysteries which are believed by faith; and faith consists in believing that which reason does not believe-which is only another miracle. The history of the universal deluge therefore is like that of the tower of Babel, of Balaam's ass, of the falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of trum pets, of waters turned into blood, of the passage of the Red Sea, and of the whole of the prodigies which God condescended H to perform in favour of his chosen people -depths unfathomable by the human understanding. JAPAN. I ASK not in regard to Japan, whether this mass of islands is much greater than 3 England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Orcades together, whether the Emperor of Japan is more powerful than the Emperor of Germany, or whether the Japanese bonzes are richer than the Spanish monks. I will even unhesitatingly avow, that banished as we are to the confines of the west, we have more genius than they have, all favoured as they are by the rising sun. Our tragedies and comedies are thought better; we have made more progress in astronomy, mathematics, paintings, sculpture, and music. And what is more, they have nothing which approaches to our Burgundy and Champagne. worthless, and that they must absolutely embrace ours ?" That is however what the Latin church has done throughout the earth. It cost Japan dear: it was on the point of being drowned in its own blood like Mexico and Peru. There were in the islands of Japan twelve religions, which lived together very peaceably. Missionaries arrived from Portugal, and asked to make the thirteenth they were answered, that they were very welcome, and that they could not have too many. Thus monks were soon established at Japan with the title of bishops. Scarcely was their religion admitted for the thirteenth, than it would be the only one. One of these bishops having in his way met a counsellor of state, disputed the path with him. He maintained that he was of the first order of the state, and that the counsellor, being but the second, owed him much respect. The Japanese are much more haughty than humble. But how is it that we have so long so- The monk-bishop and some Christians licited permission to go among them, were driven away in the year 1586. Soon and that no Japanese has ever wished after the Christian religion was proeven to make a single voyage to us?scribed. The missionaries humbled themWe have ran to Macao, to the land of selves, asked pardon, obtained grace, and Yesso, and to California; we would go abused it. to the moon with Astolpho if we had his hippogriff. Is this curiosity, restlessness of mind, or a real necessity? As soon as the Europeans had cleared the Cape of Good Hope, the Propaganda flattered itself with subjugating and converting all the neighbouring people of the eastern seas. We traded with Asia, sword in hand, and every nation of the west, by turns, despatched merchants, soldiers, and priests. Let us engrave on the turbulent brains of these adventurers the memorable words of the Emperor Yon-chin, when he drove all the Jesuit missionaries and others from his empire, that they may be written on the gates of all the convents: "What would you say if we were to go into your country under the pretence of traffic, and tell your people that your religion is Finally, in 1637, the Dutch having taken a vessel which sailed from Japan to Lisbon, they found in it letters from one named Moro, Consul of Spain to Nangazaqui. These letters contained the plan of a conspiracy of the Christians of Japan to possess themselves of the country, and specified the number of vessels which were to come from Europe and Asia to aid this enterprise. The Dutch failed not to forward these letters to the government. Moro was seized: he was obliged to confess his crime, and was juridically condemned to be burnt. All the converts of the Jesuits and Dominicans then took arms, to the number of thirty thousand; a dreadful civil war followed, and these Christians were all exterminated. |