Persons struck with the practice of some
states imagine that in France they ought to make laws to engage the
nobility to enter into commerce. But these laws would be the means of
destroying the nobility, without being of any advantage to trade. The
practice of this country is extremely wise; merchants are not nobles,
though they may become so. They have the hopes of obtaining a degree of
nobility, unattended with its actual inconveniences. There is no surer
way of being advanced above their profession than to manage it well, or
with success; the consequence of which is generally an affluent fortune.
Laws which oblige every one to continue in his profession, and to
devolve it upon his children, neither are nor can be of use in any but
despotic kingdoms; where nobody either can or ought to have
emulation.
[18]
Let none say that every one will succeed better in his profession
when he cannot change it for another: I say that a person will succeed
best when those who have excelled hope to rise to another.
The possibility of purchasing honour with gold encourages many
merchants to put themselves in circumstances by which they may attain
it. I do not take it upon me to examine the justice of thus bartering
for money the price of virtue. There are governments where this may be
very useful.
In France the dignity of the long robe, which places those who wear
it between the great nobility and the people, and without having such
shining honours as the former, has all their privileges; a dignity
which, while this body, the depositary of the laws, is encircled with
glory, leaves the private members in a mediocrity of fortune; a dignity
in which there are no other means of distinction but by a superior
capacity and virtue, yet which still leaves in view one much more
illustrious: the warlike nobility, likewise, who conceive that, whatever
degree of wealth they are possessed of, they may still increase their
fortunes; who are ashamed of augmenting, if they begin not with
dissipating, their estates; who always serve their prince with their
whole capital stock, and when that is sunk make room for others, who
follow their example; who take the field that they may never be
reproached with not having been there; who, when they can no longer hope
for riches, live in expectation of honours; and when they have not
obtained the latter, enjoy the consolation of having acquired glory: all
these things together have necessarily contributed to augment the
grandeur of this kingdom; and if for two or three centuries it has been
incessantly increasing in power, this must be attributed not to Fortune,
who was never famed for constancy, but to the goodness of its laws.
