Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/381

Rh but the wise regulations made at that time hindered it from infecting the mass of the people.

We find by the law of the Lombards that this disease was spread in Italy before the crusades, and merited the attention of the legislators. Rotharis ordained that a leper should be expelled from his house and banished to a particular place, that he should be incapable of disposing of his property, because from the very moment he had been driven from home, he was reckoned dead in the eye of the law. In order to prevent all communication with lepers, they were rendered incapable of civil acts.

I am apt to think that this disease was brought into Italy by the conquests of the Greek emperors, in whose armies there might be some soldiers from Palestine or Ægypt. Be that as it may, the progress of it was stopt till the time of the crusades.

It is related that Pompey's soldiers returning from Syria brought a distemper home with them not unlike the leprosy. We have no account of any regulation made at that time; but it is highly probable that some regulation was made, since the distemper was stopped till the time of the Lombards.

It is now two centuries since a disease unknown to our ancestors, was first transplanted from the new world to ours, and came to attack human nature even in the very source of life and pleasure. Most of the principal families in the south of Europe were seen to perish by a distemper, that was grown too common to be ignominious, and was considered in no other light, than in that of its being fatal. It was the thirst of gold that propagated this disease; the Europeans went continually to America, and always brought back a new leaven of it. Rh