ections, passions, instincts, and
habits. Routine is more powerful with them than logic. A few are
greedy of novelties, and are always for trying experiments; but the
great body of the people of all nations have an invincible repugnance
to abandon what they know for what they know not. They are, to a great
extent, the slaves of their own vis inertiae, and will not make the
necessary exertion to change their existing mode of life, even for a
better. Interest itself is powerless before their indolence,
prejudice, habits, and usages. Never were philosophers more ignorant
of human nature than they, so numerous in the last century, who
imagined that men can be always moved by a sense of interest, and that
enlightened self-interest, L'interet bien entendu, suffices to found
and sustain the state. No reform, no change in the constitution of
government or of society, whatever the advantages it may promise, can
be successful, if introduced, unless it has its root or germ in the
past. Man is never a creator; he can only develop and continue,
because he is himself a creature, and only a second cause. The
children of Israel, when they encountered the privations of the
wilderness that lay between them and the promised land flowing with
milk and honey, fainted in spirit, and begged Moses to lead them back
to Egypt, and permit them to return to slavery.

In the alleged state of nature, as the philosophers describe it, there
is no germ of civilization, and the transition to civil society would
not be a development, but a complete rupture with the past, and an
entire new creation. When it is with the greatest difficulty that
necessary reforms are introduced in old and highly civilized nations
and when it can seldom be done at all without terrible political and
social convulsions, how can we suppose men without society, and knowing
nothing of it, can deliberately, and, as it were, with "malice
aforethought," found society? Without government, and destitute alike
of habits of obedience and habits of command, how can they initiate,
establish, and sustain government? To suppose it, would be to suppose
that men in a state of nature, without culture, without science,
without any of the arts, even the most simple and necessary, are
infinitely superior to the men formed under the most advanced
civilization. Was Rousseau right in asserting civilization as a fall,
as a deterioration of the race?

But suppose the state of nature, eve