Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/247

Rh which teaches us to do to others what we would have done to ourselves; the law that forms political societies, whose duration nature has not limited; and in fine the law derived from the nature of the thing itself. Conquest is an acquisition; acquisition carries with it the spirit of preservation and use, and not of destruction.

A conquered nation is treated by the conqueror one of the four following ways. Either he continues to rule them according to their own laws, and assumes to himself only the exercise of the political and civil government; or he gives them a new political and civil government; or he destroys and disperses the society; or in fine, he exterminates the inhabitants.

The first way is conformable to the law of nations now followed; the fourth is more agreeable to the law of nations followed by the Romans: in respect to which I leave the reader to judge how far we have improved upon the ancients. We must give due praise to our modern times, to our present reason, to our religion, philosophy, and manners.

The authors of our public law, guided by ancient histories, without confining themselves to cases of strict necessity, have fallen into very great errors. They have adopted tyrannical and arbitrary principles, by supposing the conquerors to be invested with I know not what right to kill; from thence they have drawn consequences as terrible as very principle, and established maxims which the conquerors themselves, when possessed of the least grain of sense, never presumed to follow. It is a plain case that when the conquest is completed, the conqueror has no longer a right to kill, because he has no Rh