23.11. 11. Of the Severity of Government.
Men who have absolutely nothing,
such as beggars, have many children. This proceeds from their being in
the case of a rising people: it costs the father nothing to give his
heart to his offspring, who even in their infancy are the instruments of
this art. These people multiply in a rich or superstitious country,
because they do not support the burden of society, but are themselves
the burden. But men who are poor, only because they live under a severe
government; who regard their fields less as the source of their
subsistence than as a cause of vexation; these men, I say, have few
children: they have not even subsistence for themselves. How then can
they think of dividing it? They are unable to take care of their own
persons when they are sick. How then can they attend to the wants of
creatures whose infancy is a continual sickness?
It is pretended by some who are apt to talk of things which they
have never examined that the greater the poverty of the subjects, the
more numerous their families: that the more they are loaded with taxes,
the more industriously they endeavour to put themselves in a station in
which they will be able to pay them: two sophisms, which have always
destroyed and will for ever be the destruction of monarchies.
The severity of government may be carried to such an extreme as to
make the natural sentiments destructive of the natural sentiments
themselves. Would the women of America have refused to bear children
had their masters been less cruel?
[11]
Footnotes
[11]
Ibid., p. 97, 3rd ed.
