The legislators of China went further.
[18]
They confounded their religion,
laws, manners, and customs; all these were morality, 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 the practice. They were taught by their men of
letters, 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 ease with which these rites are
engraved on the hearts and minds of the Chinese; one, the difficulty of
writing, which during the greatest part of their lives wholly employs
their attention,
[19]
because it is necessary to prepare them to read and
understand the books in which they are comprised; the other, that the
ritual precepts having nothing in them that is spiritual, but being
merely rules of common practice, are more adapted to convince and strike
the mind than things merely intellectual.
Those princes who, instead of ruling by these rites, governed by the
force of punishments, wanted to accomplish that by punishments which it
is not in their power to produce, that is, to give habits of morality.
By punishments, a subject is very justly cut off from society, who,
having lost the purity of his manners, violates the laws; but if all the
world were to lose their moral habits, would these reestablish them?
Punishments may be justly inflicted to put a stop to many of the
consequences of the general evil, but they will not remove the evil
itself. Thus when the principles of the Chinese government were
discarded, and morality was banished, the state fell into anarchy, and
revolutions succeeded.
