Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/419

Rh Women have naturally so many duties to fulfil, duties which are peculiarly theirs; that they cannot be enough excluded from every thing capable of inspiring other ideas; from every thing that goes by the name of amusements; and from every thing which we call business.

We find the manners more pure in the several parts of the east, in proportion as the confinement of women is more strictly observed. In great kingdoms, there are necessarily great lords. The greater their wealth, the more enlarged is their ability of keeping their wives in an exact confinement, and of preventing them from entering again into society. From hence it proceeds, that in the empires of Turky, Persia, of the Mogul, China, and Japan, the manners of their wives are admirable.

But the case is not the same with India, where a multitude of islands, and the situation of the land, have divided the country into an infinite number of little states, which from causes that we have not here room to mention, are rendered despotic.

There are none there but the wretches who pillage, and the wretches who are pillaged. Their grandees have very moderate fortunes; and those whom they call rich, have only a bare subsistence. The confinement of their women cannot therefore be very strict; nor can they make use of any great precautions to keep them within due bounds; from hence it proceeds that the corruption of their manners is scarcely to be conceived.

We may there see to what an extreme, the vices of a climate, indulged in full liberty, will carry licentiousness. It is there that nature has a strength, Rh