10.4. 4. Some Advantages of a conquered People.
Instead of inferring such
destructive consequences from the right of conquest, much better would
it have been for politicians to mention the advantages which this very
right may sometimes give to a conquered people — advantages which would
be more sensibly and more universally experienced were our law of
nations exactly followed, and established in every part of the globe.
Conquered countries are, generally speaking, degenerated from their
original institution. Corruption has crept in, the execution of the laws
has been neglected, and the government has grown oppressive. Who can
question but such a state would be a gainer, and derive some advantages
from the very conquest itself, if it did not prove destructive? When a
government has arrived at that degree of corruption as to be incapable
of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being newly moulded. A
conqueror who enters triumphant into a country where the moneyed men
have, by a variety of artifices, insensibly arrived at innumerable ways
of encroaching on the public, where the miserable people, who see abuses
grown into laws, are ready to sink under the weight of impression, yet
think they have no right to apply for redress — a conqueror, I say, may
make a total change, and then the tyranny of those wretches will be the
first thing exposed to his resentment.
We have beheld, 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 use 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 filled their heads with
a frantic superstition. They might have set slaves at liberty; they made
freemen slaves. They might have undeceived them with regard to the abuse
of human sacrifices; instead of that they destroyed them. Never should I
have finished, were I to recount all the good they might have done, and
all the mischief they committed.
It is a conqueror's business to repair a part of the mischief he has
occasioned. The right, therefore, of conquest I define thus: a
necessary, lawful, but unhappy power, which leaves the conqueror under a
heavy obligation of repairing the injuries done to humanity.
