Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/230

178 To preserve America she did what even despotic power itself does not attempt, she destroyed the inhabitants. To preserve her colony, she was obliged to keep it dependent even for its subsistence.

In the Netherlands she essayed to render herself arbitrary; and as soon as she abandoned the attempt, her perplexity increased. On the one hand the Walloons would not be governed by Spaniards, and on the other the Spanish soldiers refused to submit to Walloon officers.

In Italy she maintained her ground, merely by exhausting herself and by enriching that country. For those who would have been glad to have got rid of the king of Spain, were not in a humour to refuse his gold.

Large empire supposes a despotic authority in the person that governs. It is necessary that the quickness of the prince's resolutions should supply the distance of the places they are sent to; that fear should prevent the carelessness of the remote governor or magistrate; that the law should be derived from a single person, and should change continually according to the accidents which incessantly multiply in a state in proportion to its extent.

F it be therefore the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince; the Rh