Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/386

334 a free-born woman who had yielded to the embraces of a married man, was delivered up to his wife to dispose of her as she pleased. They obliged the slaves, if they found their master's wife in adultery, to bind her, and carry her to her husband; they even permitted her children to be her accusers, and her slaves to be tortured in order to convict her. Thus their laws were far better adapted to refine, even to excess, a certain point of honor, than to form a good civil administration. We must not therefore be surprized it count Julian was of opinion, that an affront of that kind ought to be expiated by the ruin of his king and country: we must not be surprized if the Moors, with such a conformity of manners, found it so easy a matter to settle and to maintain themselves in Spain, and to retard the fall of their empire.

HE people of Japan are of so stubborn and perverse a temper, that neither their legislators nor magistrates can put any confidence in them: they set nothing before their eyes but judges, menaces, and chastisements; every step they take is subject to the inquisition of the civil magistrate. Those laws which out of five heads of families establish one as a magistrate over the other four; those laws which punish a family or a whole ward for a single crime; those laws in fine which find no one innocent where there may happen to be one Rh