welfare of nations. As its care produces labor, activity, abundance, and
health, its neglect and its injustice produce indolence, discouragement,
famine, contagion, vices, and crimes. It can bring to light, or can
smother talents, skill, and virtue. In fact the government, distributing
rank, wealth, rewards and punishments; master of the things in which men
have learned from childhood to place their happiness, acquires a
necessary influence on their conduct, inflames their passions, turns
them as it will, modifies and settles their manners and customs.
[Footnote: _Moeurs_, a word for which we have no exact equivalent.
It includes the idea of morals as well as that of customs.] These are,
in whole nations, as in individuals, but the conduct, or general system
of will and action which necessarily results from their education, their
government, their laws, their religious opinions, their wise or foolish
institutions. In short, manners and customs are the habits of nations;
good when they produce solid and true happiness for society, and
detestable in the eyes of reason, in spite of the sanction of laws,
usage, religion, public opinion or example, when they have the support
only of habit and prejudice, which seldom consult experience and good
sense. No action is so abominable that it is not, or has not been,
approved by some nation. Parricide, infanticide, theft, usurpation,
cruelty, intolerance, prostitution, have been allowed and even
considered meritorious by some of the peoples of the earth. Religion
especially has consecrated the most revolting and unreasonable customs.

The cause of the wickedness and corruption of men is that nowhere are
they governed according to their nature. Men are bad, not because they
are born bad, but because they are made so. The great and powerful
safely crush the poor and unfortunate, who try, at the risk of their
lives, to return the evil they have suffered. The poor attack openly, or
in secret, that unjust society which gives all to some of its children