Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/250

198 When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded. A conqueror that enters triumphant into a country, where the monied men have by a thousand wiles and artifiees insensibly practised innumerable waves of usurping; where the miserable people, who grieve to see abuses grow into laws, live under oppression, and think they have no right to complain; a conqueror, I say, may make a total change, and then the masked tyranny will be the first thing exposed to his fury.

We have seen, for instance, countries oppressed by the farmers of the revenues, and eased afterwards by the conqueror, who had neither the engagements nor wants of the legitimate prince. Even the abuses have been often redressed without any interposition of the conqueror.

Sometimes the frugality of a conquering nation has enabled them to allow the conquered those necessaries, of which they had been deprived under a lawful prince.

A conquest may destroy pernicious prejudices, and lay, if I may presume to make use of the expression, the nation under a better genius.

What good might not the Spaniards have done to the Mexicans? They had a mild religion to impart to them? but they gave them a mad superstition. They might have set slaves at liberty; they made free men slaves. They might have undeceived them with regard to the abuse of human sacrifices; instead of that they destroyed them. Never should I have done, were I to recount all the good they did not, and all the mischief they did. Rh