are held out to him to be persecuting; because his institutions invite
him to the commission of evil, under the lure of promoting his own
immediate happiness. In most countries superstition renders him a
useless being, makes him an abject slave, causes him to tremble under
its terrors, or else turns him into a furious fanatic, who is at once
cruel, intolerant, and inhuman: in a great number of states arbitrary
power crushes him, obliges him to become a cringing sycophant, renders
him completely vicious: in those despotic states the law rarely visits
crime with punishment, except in those who are too feeble to oppose its
course? or when it has become incapable of restraining the violent
excesses to which a bad government gives birth. In short, rational
education is neglected; a prudent culture of the human mind is despised;
it depends, but too frequently, upon bigotted, superstitious priests,
who are interested in deceiving man, and who are sometimes impostors; or
else upon parents or masters without understanding, who are devoid of
morals, who impress on the ductile mind of their scholars those vices
with which they are themselves tormented; who transmit to them the false
opinions, which they believe they have an interest in making them adopt.

All this proves the necessity of falling back to man's original errors,
and recurring to the primitive source of his wanderings, if it be
seriously intended to furnish him with suitable remedies for such
enormous maladies: it is useless to dream of correcting his mistakes, of
curing him of his depravity, until the true causes that move his will
are unravelled; until more real, more beneficial, more certain motives
are substituted for those which are found so inefficacious; which prove
so dangerous both to society and to himself. It is for those who guide
the human will, who regulate the condition of nations, who hold the real
happiness of man in their grasp, to seek after these motives,--with
which reason will readily furnish them--which experience will enable