Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Complete work
Notes, 3
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Je ne répéterai point ici sur la guerre ce que j’en ai dit ailleurs; mais je voudrais que les gens instruits voulussent ou osassent donner une fois au public le détail des horreurs qui se commettent dans les armées par les entrepreneurs des vivres et des hôpitaux, on verrait que leurs manœuvres non trop secrètes par lesquelles les plus brillantes armées se fondent en moins de rien font plus périr de soldats que n’en moissonne le fer ennemi. C’est encore un calcul non moins étonnant que celui des hommes que la mer engloutit tous les ans, soit par la faim, soit par le scorbut, soit par les pirates, soit par le feu, soit par les naufrages. Il est clair qu’il faut mettre aussi sur le compte de la propriété établie, et par conséquent de la société, les assassinats, les empoisonnements, les vols de grands chemins et les punitions mêmes de ces crimes, punitions nécessaires pour prévenir de plus grands maux, mais qui, pour le meurtre d’un homme coûtant la vie à deux ou davantage, ne laissent pas de doubler réellement la perte de l’espèce humaine. Combien de moyens honteux d’empêcher la naissance des hommes et de tromper la nature? Soit par ces goûts brutaux et dépravés qui insultent son plus charmant ouvrage, goûts que les sauvages ni les animaux ne connurent jamais, et qui ne sont nés dans les pays policés que d’une imagination corrompue; soit par ces avortements secrets, dignes fruits de la débauche et de l’honneur vicieux; soit par l’exposition ou le meurtre d’une multitude d’enfants, victimes de la misère de leurs parents ou de la honte barbare de leurs mères; soit enfin par la mutilation de ces malheureux dont une partie de l’existence et toute la postérité sont sacrifiées à de vaines chansons, ou, ce qui est pis encore, à la brutale jalousie de quelques hommes, mutilation qui dans ce dernier cas outrage doublement la nature, et par le traitement que reçoivent ceux qui la souffrent, et par l’usage auquel ils sont destinés. Que serait-ce si j’entreprenais de montrer l’espèce humaine attaquée dans sa source même, et jusque dans le plus saint de tous les liens, où l’on n’ose plus écouter la nature qu’après avoir consulté la fortune et où, le désordre civil confondant les vertus et les vices, la continence devient une précaution criminelle, et le refus de donner la vie à son semblable, un acte d’humanité? Mais sans déchirer le voile qui couvre tant d’horreurs, contentons-nous d’indiquer le mal auquel d’autres doivent apporter le remède.
Qu’on ajoute à tout cela cette quantité de métiers malsains qui abrègent les jours ou détruisent le tempérament; tels que sont les travaux des mines, les diverses préparations des métaux, des minéraux, surtout du plomb, du cuivre, du mercure, du cobalt, de l’arsenic, du réalgar; ces autres métiers périlleux qui coûtent tous les jours la vie à quantité d’ouvriers, les uns couvreurs, d’autres charpentiers, d’autres maçons, d’autres travaillant aux carrières; qu’on réunisse, dis-je, tous ces objets, et l’on pourra voir dans l’établissement et la perfection des sociétés les raisons de la diminution de l’espèce, observée par plus d’un philosophe.
Le luxe, impossible à prévenir chez des hommes avides de leurs propres commodités et de la considération des autres, achève bientôt le mal que les sociétés ont commencé, et sous prétexte de faire vivre les pauvres qu’il n’eût pas fallu faire, il appauvrit tout le reste et dépeuple l’État tôt ou tard.
Le luxe est un remède beaucoup pire que le mal qu’il prétend guérir; ou plutôt, il est lui-même le pire de tous les maux, dans quelque État grand ou petit que ce puisse être, et qui, pour nourrir des foules de valets et de misérables qu’il a faits, accable et ruine le laboureur et le citoyen. Semblable à ces vents brûlants du midi qui, couvrant l’herbe et la verdure d’insectes dévorants, ôtent la subsistance aux animaux utiles et portent la disette et la mort dans tous les lieux où ils se font sentir.
De la société et du luxe qu’elle engendre, naissent les arts libéraux et mécaniques, le commerce, les lettres; et toutes ces inutilités, qui font fleurir l’industrie, enrichissent et perdent les États. La raison de ce dépérissement est très simple. Il est aisé de voir que par sa nature l’agriculture doit être le moins lucratif de tous les arts; parce que son produit étant de l’usage le plus indispensable pour tous les hommes, le prix en doit être proportionné aux facultés des plus pauvres. Du même principe on peut tirer cette règle, qu’en général les arts sont lucratifs en raison inverse de leur utilité et que les plus nécessaires doivent enfin devenir les plus négligés. Par où l’on voit ce qu’il faut penser des vrais avantages de l’industrie et de l’effet réel qui résulte de ses progrès.
Telles sont les causes sensibles de toutes les misères où l’opulence précipite enfin les nations les plus admirées. À mesure que l’industrie et les arts s’étendent et fleurissent, le cultivateur, méprisé, chargé d’impôts nécessaires à l’entretien du luxe et condamné à passer sa vie entre le travail et la faim, abandonne ses champs, pour aller chercher dans les villes le pain qu’il y devrait porter. Plus les capitales frappent d’admiration les yeux stupides du peuple, plus il faudrait gémir de voir les campagnes abandonnées, les terres en friche, et les grands chemins inondés de malheureux citoyens devenus mendiants ou voleurs et destinés à finir un jour leur misère sur la roue ou sur un fumier. C’est ainsi que l’État, s’enrichissant d’un côté, s’affaiblit et se dépeuple de l’autre, et que les plus puissantes monarchies, après bien des travaux pour se rendre opulentes et désertes, finissent par devenir la proie des nations pauvres qui succombent à la funeste tentation de les envahir, et qui s’enrichissent et s’affaiblissent à leur tour, jusqu’à ce qu’elles soient elles-mêmes envahies et détruites par d’autres.
Qu’on daigne nous expliquer une fois ce qui avait pu produire ces nuées de barbares qui durant tant de siècles ont inondé l’Europe, l’Asie et l’Afrique? Était-ce à l’industrie de leurs arts, à la sagesse de leurs lois, à l’excellence de leur police, qu’ils devaient cette prodigieuse population? Que nos savants veuillent bien nous dire pourquoi, loin de multiplier à ce point, ces hommes féroces et brutaux, sans lumières, sans frein, sans éducation, ne s’entr’égorgeaient pas tous à chaque instant, pour se disputer leur pâture ou leur chasse? Qu’ils nous expliquent comment ces misérables ont eu seulement la hardiesse de regarder en face de si habiles gens que nous étions, avec une si belle discipline militaire, de si beaux codes, et de si sages lois? Enfin, pourquoi, depuis que la société s’est perfectionnée dans les pays du Nord et qu’on y a tant pris de peine pour appendre aux hommes leurs devoirs mutuels et l’art de vivre agréablement et paisiblement ensemble, on n’en voit plus rien sortir de semblable à ces multitudes d’hommes qu’il produisait autrefois? J’ai bien peur que quelqu’un ne s’avise à la fin de me répondre que toutes ces grandes choses, savoir les arts, les sciences et les lois, ont été très sagement inventées par les hommes, comme une peste salutaire pour prévenir l’excessive multiplication de l’espèce, de peur que ce monde, qui nous est destiné, ne devînt à la fin trop petit pour ses habitants.
Quoi donc? Faut-il détruire les sociétés, anéantir le tien et le mien, et retourner vivre dans les forêts avec les ours? Conséquence à la manière de mes adversaires, que j’aime autant prévenir que de leur laisser la honte de la tirer. O vous, à qui la voix céleste ne s’est point fait entendre et qui ne reconnaissez pour votre espèce d’autre destination que d’achever en paix cette courte vie, vous qui pouvez laisser au milieu des villes vos funestes acquisitions, vos esprits inquiets, vos cœurs corrompus et vos désirs effrénés, reprenez, puisqu’il dépend de vous, votre antique et première innocence; allez dans les bois perdre la vue et la mémoire des crimes de vos contemporains et ne craignez point d’avilir votre espèce, en renonçant à ses lumières pour renoncer à ses vices. Quant aux hommes semblables à moi dont les passions ont détruit pour toujours l’originelle simplicité, qui ne peuvent plus se nourrir d’herbe et de gland, ni se passer de lois et de chefs, ceux qui furent honorés dans leur premier père de leçons surnaturelles, ceux qui verront dans l’intention de donner d’abord aux actions humaines une moralité qu’elles n’eussent de longtemps acquise, la raison d’un précepte indifférent par lui-même et inexplicable dans tout autre système; ceux, en un mot, qui sont convaincus que la voix divine appela tout le genre humain aux lumières et au bonheur des célestes intelligences, tout ceux-là tâcheront, par l’exercice des vertus qu’ils s’obligent à pratiquer en apprenant à les connaître, à mériter le prix éternel qu’ils en doivent attendre; ils respecteront les sacrés liens des sociétés dont ils sont les membres; ils aimeront leurs semblables et les serviront de tout leur pouvoir; ils obéiront scrupuleusement aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs et les ministres, ils honoreront surtout les bons et sages princes qui sauront prévenir, guérir ou pallier cette foule d’abus et de maux toujours prêts à nous accabler, ils animeront le zèle de ces dignes chefs, en leur montrant sans crainte et sans flatterie la grandeur de leur tâche et la rigueur de leur devoir; mais ils n’en mépriseront pas moins une constitution qui ne peut se maintenir qu’à l’aide de tant de gens respectables qu’on désire plus souvent qu’on ne les obtient et de laquelle, malgré tous leurs soins, naissent toujours plus de calamités réelles que d’avantages apparents.
Note 10
Parmi les hommes que nous connaissons, ou par nous-mêmes, ou par les historiens, ou par les voyageurs, les uns sont noirs, les autres blancs, les autres rouges; les uns portent de longs cheveux, les autres n’ont que de la laine frisée; les uns sont presque tout velus, les autres n’ont pas même de barbe; il y a eu et il y a peut-être encore des nations d’hommes d’une taille gigantesque, et laissant à part la fable des Pygmées qui peut bien n’être qu’une exagération, on sait que les Lapons et surtout les Groenlandais sont fort au-dessous de la taille moyenne de l’homme; on prétend même qu’il y a des peuples entiers qui ont des queues comme les quadrupèdes, et sans ajouter une foi aveugle aux relations d’Hérodote et de Ctésias, on en peut du moins tirer cette opinion très vraisemblable, que si l’on avait pu faire de bonnes observations dans ces temps anciens où les peuples divers suivaient des manières de vivre plus différentes entre elles qu’ils ne font aujourd’hui, on y aurait aussi remarqué dans la figure et l’habitude du corps, des variétés beaucoup plus frappantes. Tous ces faits dont il est aisé de fournir des preuves incontestables, ne peuvent surprendre que ceux qui sont accoutumés à ne regarder que les objets qui les environnent et qui ignorent les puissants effets de la diversité des climats, de l’air, des aliments, de la manière de vivre, des habitudes en général, et surtout la force étonnante des mêmes causes, quand elles agissent continuellement sur de longues suites de générations. Aujourd’hui que le commerce, les voyages et les conquêtes réunissent davantage les peuples divers, et que leurs manières de vivre se rapprochent sans cesse par la fréquente communication, on s’aperçoit que certaines différences nationales ont diminué, et par exemple, chacun peut remarquer que les Français d’aujourd’hui ne sont plus ces grands corps blancs et blonds décrits par les historiens latins, quoique le temps joint au mélange des Francs et des Normands, blancs et blonds eux-mêmes, eût dû rétablir ce que la fréquentation des Romains avait pu ôter à l’influence du climat, dans la constitution naturelle et le teint des habitants. Toutes ces observations sur les variétés que mille causes peuvent produire et ont produit en effet dans l’espèce humaine me font douter si divers animaux semblables aux hommes, pris par les voyageurs pour des bêtes sans beaucoup d’examen, ou à cause de quelques différences qu’ils remarquaient dans la conformation extérieure, ou seulement parce que ces animaux ne parlaient pas, ne seraient point en effet de véritables hommes sauvages, dont la race dispersée anciennement dans les bois n’avait eu occasion de développer aucune de ses facultés virtuelles, n’avait acquis aucun degré de perfection et se trouvait encore dans l’état primitif de nature. Donnons un exemple de ce que je veux dire.
« On trouve, dit le traducteur de l’Histoire des voyages, dans le royaume de Congo quantité de ces grands animaux qu’on nomme Orang-Outang aux Indes orientales, qui tiennent comme le milieu entre l’espèce humaine et les babouins. Battel raconte que dans les forêts de Mayomba au royaume de Loango, on voit deux sortes de monstres dont les plus grands se nomment Pongos et les autres Enjokos. Les premiers ont une ressemblance exacte avec l’homme; mais ils sont beaucoup plus gros, et de fort haute taille. Avec un visage humain, ils ont les yeux fort enfoncés. Leurs mains, leurs joues, leurs oreilles sont sans poil, à l’exception des sourcils qu’ils ont fort longs. Quoiqu’ils aient le reste du corps assez velu, le poil n’en est pas fort épais, et sa couleur est brune. Enfin, la seule partie qui les distingue des hommes est la jambe qu’ils ont sans mollet. Ils marchent droits en se tenant de la main le poil du cou; leur retraite est dans les bois; ils dorment sur les arbres et s’y font une espèce de toit qui les met à couvert de la pluie. Leurs aliments sont des fruits ou des noix sauvages. Jamais ils ne mangent de chair. L’usage des Nègres qui traversent les forêts est d’y allumer des feux pendant la nuit. Ils remarquent que le matin à leur départ les pongos prennent leur place autour du feu et ne se retirent pas qu’il ne soit éteint: car avec beaucoup d’adresse, ils n’ont point assez de sens pour l’entretenir en y apportant du bois. Ils marchent quelquefois en troupes et tuent les Nègres qui traversent les forêts. Ils tombent même sur les éléphants qui viennent paître dans les lieux qu’ils habitent et les incommodent si fort à coups de poing ou de bâton qu’ils les forcent à prendre la fuite en poussant des cris. On ne prend jamais de pongos en vie; parce qu’ils sont si robustes que dix hommes ne suffiraient pas pour les arrêter. Mais les Nègres en prennent quantité de jeunes après avoir tué la mère, au corps de laquelle le petit s’attache fortement: lorsqu’un de ces animaux meurt, les autres couvrent son corps d’un amas de branches ou de feuillages. Purchass ajoute que dans les conversations qu’il avait eues avec Battel, il avait appris de lui-même qu’un pongo lui enleva un petit Nègre qui passa un mois entier dans la société de ces animaux; car ils ne font aucun mal aux hommes qu’ils surprennent, du moins lorsque ceux-ci ne les regardent point, comme le petit Nègre l’avait observé. Battel n’a point décrit la seconde espèce de monstre.
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes) for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity.
I shall not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war; but I wish that informed people would be willing, or would dare, for once to give the public a detailed account of the horrors committed in armies by the contractors who supply food and hospitals. We would see that their none-too-secret maneuvers, through which even the most splendid armies melt away in no time, kill more soldiers than the enemy's steel cuts down. No less astonishing is a reckoning of the men swallowed by the sea each year, whether through hunger, scurvy, pirates, fire, or shipwreck. Clearly we must also charge established property, and therefore society, with murders, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishments for these crimes—punishments necessary to prevent greater evils, but which, by costing two or more lives for the murder of one man, nonetheless actually double the loss to the human species. How many shameful ways there are to prevent human beings from being born and to deceive nature! Whether through those brutal and depraved tastes that insult her most charming work, tastes unknown to savages and animals alike and born in civilized countries only of a corrupted imagination; or through secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and a perverted sense of honor; or through the abandonment or killing of multitudes of children, victims of their parents' poverty or their mothers' barbarous shame; or, finally, through the mutilation of those unfortunates whose part in life and whose entire posterity are sacrificed to empty songs or, worse still, to the brutal jealousy of certain men—a mutilation that in this last case doubly outrages nature, both in the treatment suffered by its victims and in the use to which they are put. What if I were to show the human species attacked at its very source, even in the holiest of all bonds, where people no longer dare heed nature until they have consulted fortune, and where, as civil disorder confuses virtue with vice, continence becomes a criminal precaution and refusing to give life to another human being becomes an act of humanity? But without tearing aside the veil that covers so many horrors, let us be content to indicate the evil for which others must provide a remedy.
Add to all this the host of unhealthy trades that shorten people's days or ruin their constitutions: work in the mines, the various processes for preparing metals and minerals, especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, and realgar; and those other perilous trades that daily cost many workers their lives—roofers, carpenters, masons, quarry workers. Bring all these things together, I say, and one may see in the establishment and refinement of societies the causes of the decline of the human species observed by more than one philosopher.
Luxury, impossible to prevent among men greedy for their own comforts and the esteem of others, soon completes the harm that societies began; on the pretext of supporting the poor, whom it ought never to have brought into being, it impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the state.
Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it claims to cure; or rather, it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, large or small. To feed the crowds of servants and paupers it has created, it crushes and ruins farmer and citizen alike. It is like those scorching south winds which, covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, strip useful animals of their sustenance and carry scarcity and death wherever they blow.
From society and the luxury it breeds come the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all these useless things, which make industry flourish, enrich states, and bring them to ruin. The reason for this decline is very simple. It is easy to see that agriculture must by its nature be the least profitable of all the arts, because its produce is the most indispensable to everyone and must therefore be priced within the means of the poorest. From the same principle we may draw this rule: in general, the profitability of the arts is inversely proportional to their usefulness, and those most necessary must in the end become the most neglected. This shows what we should think of the true benefits of industry and the real effects of its progress.
Such are the visible causes of all the miseries into which wealth ultimately plunges the most admired nations. As industry and the arts spread and flourish, the cultivator, despised, burdened with the taxes needed to sustain luxury, and condemned to spend his life between toil and hunger, abandons his fields to seek in the cities the bread he ought to bring to them. The more the capitals dazzle the people's unseeing eyes, the more we should grieve to see the countryside abandoned, the land lying fallow, and the highways flooded with unhappy citizens turned beggars or thieves, destined one day to end their misery on the breaking wheel or a dungheap. Thus the state, growing rich on one side, grows weak and depopulated on the other; and the most powerful monarchies, after all their labor to make themselves wealthy and deserted, end by falling prey to poor nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them, grow rich and weak in turn, and are themselves finally invaded and destroyed by others.
Would someone please explain to us what could have produced those clouds of barbarians who for so many centuries swept over Europe, Asia, and Africa? Was it to the skill of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, or the excellence of their government that they owed this prodigious population? Let our scholars tell us why these fierce and brutish men, without enlightenment, restraint, or education, far from multiplying to such an extent, did not slaughter one another at every moment in disputes over their pasture or their game. Let them explain how these wretches even had the boldness to look us in the face, accomplished people that we were, with our splendid military discipline, splendid codes, and wise laws. Finally, why, since society has been perfected in northern countries, and so much trouble taken there to teach men their mutual duties and the art of living together pleasantly and peacefully, do we no longer see anything like the multitudes of people those countries once produced? I greatly fear that someone will finally think to answer me that all these great things—the arts, sciences, and laws—were most wisely invented by men as a beneficial plague to prevent the excessive multiplication of the species, lest this world, which is meant for us, at last become too small for its inhabitants.
What, then? Must we destroy societies, abolish yours and mine, and go back to living in the forests with the bears? A conclusion in the manner of my adversaries, which I would as soon forestall as leave them the shame of drawing it. You to whom the voice of heaven has not spoken, who recognize no destiny for your species other than to finish this brief life in peace; you who can leave behind in the midst of cities your fatal acquisitions, your restless minds, your corrupted hearts, and your unbridled desires: regain, since it is in your power, your ancient and original innocence. Go into the woods, lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and do not fear that you debase your species by renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer live on grass and acorns or do without laws and leaders; those who were honored, in their first father, with supernatural instruction; those who will see, in the intention to give human actions from the outset a moral character they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable under any other system; those, in short, who are convinced that the divine voice called all mankind to the enlightenment and happiness of the heavenly intelligences: all such men will strive, through the exercise of virtues they pledge themselves to practice as they learn to know them, to deserve the eternal reward they ought to expect from them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies to which they belong; they will love their fellows and serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who make and administer them; they will honor above all the good and wise princes who know how to forestall, cure, or palliate that host of abuses and evils forever ready to overwhelm us. They will stir the zeal of these worthy leaders by showing them, without fear or flattery, the greatness of their task and the strictness of their duty. Yet they will not on that account think any more highly of a constitution that can survive only with the help of so many admirable people, more often wished for than found, and from which, in spite of all their efforts, there always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages.
Note 10
Among the men we know, whether through our own experience or through historians or travelers, some are black, others white, still others red; some have long hair, others only curly wool; some are almost covered in hair, others lack even a beard. There have been, and perhaps still are, nations of men of gigantic stature; and, leaving aside the fable of the Pygmies, which may well be merely an exaggeration, we know that the Lapps and especially the Greenlanders are considerably shorter than the average man. It is even claimed that whole peoples have tails like quadrupeds; and without placing blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and Ctesias, we may at least draw from them the very plausible opinion that, if sound observations could have been made in those ancient times when different peoples followed ways of life more divergent than they do today, far more striking variations would also have been noticed in their bodily form and bearing. All these facts, for which indisputable evidence can readily be given, can surprise only those accustomed to looking no farther than what surrounds them, and ignorant of the powerful effects of differences in climate, air, food, ways of life, and habits in general—above all, of the astonishing force of these same causes when they act continually over long sequences of generations. Today, when commerce, travel, and conquest bring different peoples closer together, and frequent contact continually makes their ways of life more alike, we notice that certain national differences have diminished. Everyone can see, for example, that today's French are no longer those tall, fair-haired, fair-skinned people described by the Latin historians, though time, together with the mingling of the Franks and Normans, themselves fair-haired and fair-skinned, ought to have restored to the inhabitants' natural constitution and complexion whatever contact with the Romans may have taken away from the influence of the climate. All these observations on the variations that a thousand causes can produce, and have in fact produced, in the human species make me wonder whether various animals resembling men, taken by travelers for beasts without much examination, either because of certain differences they noticed in their outward form or simply because these animals did not speak, might not in fact be genuine savage men. Their race, long dispersed through the woods, would have had no occasion to develop any of its latent faculties, would have attained no degree of perfection, and would still be in the original state of nature. Let me give an example of what I mean.
“In the kingdom of Congo,” says the translator of the History of Voyages, “one finds many of those large animals called Orang-Outang in the East Indies, which stand, as it were, midway between the human species and baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba in the kingdom of Loango, two kinds of monsters are seen, the larger called Pongos and the others Enjokos. The former resemble man exactly, but are much larger and very tall. Though they have human faces, their eyes are deeply set. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are hairless, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their bodies are fairly hairy, the hair is not very thick, and it is brown. In short, the only part that distinguishes them from men is the leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, holding the hair of their necks with one hand; their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in trees and make themselves a kind of roof there to shelter them from the rain. They eat fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. The Negroes who cross the forests customarily light fires there at night. They observe that when they leave in the morning, the pongos take their places around the fire and do not withdraw until it has gone out: for despite their great dexterity, they lack the sense to keep it burning by bringing wood to it. Sometimes they travel in troops and kill the Negroes who cross the forests. They even attack the elephants that come to graze where they live and harass them so fiercely with blows from fists or sticks that they force them to flee, trumpeting. No pongos are ever taken alive, for they are so strong that ten men would not suffice to restrain one. But the Negroes capture many young ones after killing the mother, to whose body the infant clings tightly. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a heap of branches or foliage. Purchass adds that from his conversations with Battel, he learned from Battel himself that a pongo carried off a little Negro child who spent a whole month in the company of these animals; for they do no harm to people they take by surprise, at least when the people do not look at them, as the little Negro had observed. Battel did not describe the second species of monster.
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes).
I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war. But I wish well-informed people would, or dared to, give the public a detailed account of the horrors committed in armies by contractors who supply food and run hospitals. We would see that their not very secret dealings can make even the finest armies melt away almost overnight, killing more soldiers than enemy weapons do. Another shocking count is the number of people swallowed by the sea every year, whether through hunger, scurvy, pirates, fire, or shipwreck. Clearly we must also charge established property, and therefore society, with murders, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishment of these crimes. Such punishment is necessary to prevent greater harm, but when a murder costs two or more people their lives instead of one, it still doubles the loss of human life. How many shameful ways there are to prevent people from being born and to thwart nature! There are the brutal and perverted desires that insult her most charming creation. Neither wild peoples nor animals ever knew these desires; they have arisen in developed countries only through a corrupted imagination. There are secret abortions, fitting fruits of debauchery and a misguided idea of honor. There is the abandonment or murder of many children, victims of their parents’ poverty or their mothers’ cruel shame. And there is the mutilation of unfortunate people whose lives are diminished and whose entire line of descendants is sacrificed to empty songs or, worse still, to the brutal jealousy of some men. In the latter case this mutilation offends nature twice: in the treatment of those who undergo it, and in the use to which they are put. What if I tried to show the human species attacked at its very source, even in the most sacred bond of all? People no longer dare to listen to nature there until they have first consulted their fortunes. In this disorder of civil society, which confuses virtue with vice, abstaining from sex becomes a criminal precaution and refusing to give life to another human being becomes an act of kindness. But rather than tear away the veil covering so many horrors, let us simply point out an evil that others must remedy.
Add to all this the many unhealthy occupations that shorten lives or damage the body. These include mining and the various ways of preparing metals and minerals, especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, and realgar. Add the other dangerous trades that cost many workers their lives every day: roofers, carpenters, masons, and quarry workers. Put all these things together, I say, and we can see in the establishment and advancement of societies the reasons for the decrease in the human population observed by more than one philosopher.
Luxury cannot be prevented among people eager for their own comfort and for the regard of others. It soon finishes the harm that societies have begun. On the pretext of supporting poor people who should never have been brought into that condition, it impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the state.
Luxury is a cure much worse than the disease it claims to cure. Rather, it is itself the worst of all evils, in any state, large or small. To feed the crowds of servants and destitute people it has created, it overwhelms and ruins the farmer and the citizen. It is like the burning south winds: they cover grass and green plants with devouring insects, deprive useful animals of food, and bring scarcity and death wherever they blow.
Society and the luxury it produces give rise to the liberal and mechanical arts, trade, literature, and all these useless things. They make industry flourish, enrich states, and ruin them. The reason for this decline is very simple. Agriculture must naturally be the least profitable of all trades, as is easy to see. Everyone needs what it produces, so its price must be within the means of the poorest people. The same principle gives us this rule: as a general matter, the less useful a trade is, the more profitable it is. The most necessary trades must eventually become the most neglected. This shows what to think about industry’s true benefits and the real effects of its progress.
These are the visible causes of all the miseries into which wealth finally drives even the most admired nations. As industry and the arts spread and prosper, the farmer is despised, burdened with taxes needed to maintain luxury, and condemned to spend his life working while going hungry. He abandons his fields to seek in the cities the bread that he should be bringing to them. The more the great cities dazzle the unthinking public, the more we should mourn the abandoned countryside, the uncultivated land, and the highways flooded with unfortunate citizens who have become beggars or thieves. One day they will end their suffering on the breaking wheel or a dung heap. This is how a state grows rich on one side while growing weaker and less populated on the other. After working hard to become wealthy and empty, the most powerful monarchies eventually fall prey to poor nations. Those nations give in to the fatal temptation to invade them and become rich and weak in their turn, until they too are invaded and destroyed by others.
Will someone please explain what produced the swarms of peoples called barbarians that swept across Europe, Asia, and Africa for so many centuries? Did they owe their enormous population to the sophistication of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, or the excellence of their public order? Let our scholars tell us why these fierce, rough people, without knowledge, restraint, or education, did not simply kill one another at every moment in fights over grazing land or game, instead of increasing so greatly in number. Let them explain how these wretches even dared to face us, such skillful people with such fine military discipline, fine law codes, and wise laws. Finally, since society has become more developed in northern countries, and so much effort has gone into teaching people their mutual duties and how to live together pleasantly and peacefully, why do those countries no longer produce anything like the multitudes they once produced? I fear someone may finally decide to answer that people wisely invented all these great things—the arts, sciences, and laws—as a helpful plague to prevent the human species from multiplying too much, for fear that this world, meant for us, would eventually become too small for its inhabitants.
What, then? Must we destroy societies, abolish what is yours and mine, and go back to living in the forests with bears? That is just the sort of conclusion my opponents would draw. I would rather head it off than let them disgrace themselves by drawing it. You who have not heard the voice of heaven, and who see no purpose for our species other than to finish this short life in peace: you can leave your harmful acquisitions, restless minds, corrupted hearts, and unrestrained desires behind in the cities. Since you can, recover your old, original innocence. Go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries. Do not fear that you will degrade the human species by giving up its knowledge in order to give up its vices. But there are people like me, whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity forever, who can no longer live on grass and acorns or do without laws and leaders. There are those whose first father was honored with supernatural instruction. They will see why a rule that is unimportant in itself, and impossible to explain under any other account, was given: its purpose was to give human actions a moral character from the start, something they would otherwise not have acquired for a long time. In short, there are those convinced that the divine voice called the whole human race to the knowledge and happiness of heavenly minds. By practicing the virtues they commit themselves to as they learn to know them, all these people will try to deserve the eternal reward they expect. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies to which they belong. They will love other people and serve them with all their strength. They will carefully obey the laws and the people who make and enforce them. Above all, they will honor good and wise rulers who can prevent, cure, or ease the many abuses and evils always ready to overwhelm us. They will encourage the efforts of these worthy leaders by showing them, without fear or flattery, how great their task is and how demanding their duty. But they will still look down on a form of society that can survive only with the help of so many admirable people, whom we wish for more often than we actually find. For despite all their efforts, it always produces more real disasters than apparent benefits.
Note 10
Among the people we know, whether directly or through historians or travelers, some are black, others white, and others red. Some have long hair, others only curly woolly hair. Some are almost completely hairy, while others do not even have beards. There have been, and perhaps still are, nations of people of gigantic height. Leaving aside the story of the Pygmies, which may well be an exaggeration, we know that the Lapps and especially the Greenlanders are far below average human height. Some even claim that whole peoples have tails like four-legged animals. We need not blindly trust Herodotus and Ctesias to draw at least one very plausible conclusion from their accounts. If good observations could have been made in those ancient times, when different peoples lived in ways more unlike one another than they do today, observers would also have noticed much more striking differences in body shape and bearing. All these facts can easily be supported by indisputable evidence. They surprise only people used to looking no farther than their immediate surroundings, who do not know the powerful effects of differences in climate, air, food, ways of life, and habits in general. Above all, they do not know the astonishing force of these same causes when they act continuously over many generations. Today trade, travel, and conquest bring different peoples together more often, and regular contact keeps making their ways of life more alike. We can see certain differences between nations diminish. For example, anyone can see that the French today are no longer the large, fair-skinned, fair-haired people described by Latin historians. And yet the passage of time, together with the mixing of Franks and Normans, who were themselves fair-skinned and fair-haired, should have restored whatever influence the climate once had on the natural build and complexion of the inhabitants before contact with the Romans weakened it. All these observations about the differences that a thousand causes can produce, and really have produced, in the human species make me wonder about various humanlike animals. Travelers may have taken them for beasts without looking closely, because of some differences in their outward form or simply because they could not speak. Might they actually be true wild human beings? Perhaps their ancestors, long scattered through the forests, had had no chance to develop any of their potential abilities or reach any stage of improvement, and they were still in the original state of nature. Let me give an example of what I mean.
“The translator of the History of Voyages says that in the kingdom of Congo there are many of the large animals called Orang-Outangs in the East Indies. They seem to stand midway between the human species and baboons. Battel reports that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, there are two kinds of creatures. The larger ones are called Pongos and the others Enjokos. The first look exactly like humans, but they are much bigger and very tall. They have human faces and deeply set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears have no hair, except for very long eyebrows. Though the rest of their bodies are fairly hairy, their hair is not very thick, and it is brown. In fact, the only part that distinguishes them from humans is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, holding the hair on their necks with one hand. They retreat into the woods, sleep in trees, and make a sort of roof there to shelter themselves from rain. They eat fruit or wild nuts and never eat meat. Black people passing through the forests customarily light fires there at night. They observe that, when they leave in the morning, the pongos take their places around the fire and do not go away until it has gone out. For all their skill, they are not intelligent enough to keep it burning by adding wood. Sometimes they travel in groups and kill Black people crossing the forests. They even attack elephants that come to graze where they live. They hit the elephants so hard with their fists or sticks that they force them to flee, crying out. Pongos are never captured alive; they are so strong that ten men could not hold one. But Black people capture many young ones after killing the mother, to whose body the young one clings tightly. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a heap of branches or leaves. Purchas adds that in his conversations with Battel, Battel himself told him that a pongo carried off a little Black boy who spent an entire month among these animals. They do not hurt the people they catch, at least when those people do not look at them, as the boy had noticed. Battel did not describe the second kind of creature.”