h your wickedness will tolerate. "This is the sponge," says
Montesquieu, "which wipes out all the difficulties that can be raised
against the laws of Moses."

The legislator, then, ought to understand the temperament and genius of
the people because he has to frame its laws. As the Germans say, he
ought to be an expert on the psychology of races. Further, he ought to
understand the temperament, peculiarities and character of the people,
without sharing its temperament himself. For where the passions and
inclinations are concerned, experience is not knowledge. On the
contrary, experience prevents us from really knowing; and indeed one of
the conditions of knowledge is absence of an experience which may be
another word for bias.

The ideal legislator, or indeed any legislator worthy of the name, ought
to understand the general tendencies of his people, but he ought to be
able to view them from a position of detachment and to be able to
control them, because it is his business partly to satisfy and partly to
combat these tendencies.

_He has partly to satisfy them_, or at least, to consider them, because
a law which outraged the national temperament would be like Roland's
mare, which had every conceivable good quality with this one serious
defect, that she was dead, and born dead. Suppose the Romans had been
given an international law decreeing respect for conquered peoples, it
would have been a dead letter, and by a sort of contagion it would have
led to the neglect of other laws. Suppose the French were given a
liberal law, a law prescribing respect for the individual rights of the
man and the citizen. Liberty, the object of such a law, is for the
French, as Baron Joannes has remarked: "The right of each man to do what
he likes and to prevent other men from doing what they like." In France
such a law would never obtain any but a very grudging allegiance, and it
would certainly lead to the neglect of other laws.

The legislator ought therefore to understand the natural idiosyncrasies
of his people in order to know how far he dare venture to oppose them.

_Partly he must combat them_, because law should be to a nation, or
otherwise it is merely a police regulation, what the moral law is to an
individual. Law should be a restraint imposed continuously in the hope
of future improvements. It should be a curb on dangerous passions and
injurious desires. It should aid the warfare of enlightened selfishness
against the self