Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/482

430 simplicity and rigor, atoned by their virtues, for their want of complaisance.

HE legislators of China went farther. They confounded together their religion, laws, manners, and customs; all those were morals, all these were virtue. The precepts relating to these four points were what they called rites; and it was in the exact observance of these that the Chinese government triumphed. They spent their whole youth in learning them, their whole life in their practice. They were taught by their men of learning, they were inculcated by the magistrates; and as they included all the ordinary actions of life, when they found the means of making them strictly observed, China was well governed.

Two things have contributed to the case with which these rites are engraved on the hearts and minds of the Chinese; the one, the difficulty of writing, which during the greatest part of their lives wholly employs their mind, because it is necessary to prepare them to read and understand the books in which they are comprized; the other, that the ritual precepts having nothing in them, that is spiritual, but being merely rules of common practice, they are more adapted to convince and strike the mind than things merely intellectual.

Those princes who instead of governing by these rites, governed by the force of punishments, wanted Rh