. But when a government, not content with
requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark
its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a
government which attempts more than it ought will reform less. A
lawgiver who, in order to protect distressed borrowers, limits the rate
of interest, either makes it impossible for the objects of his care to
borrow at all, or places them at the mercy of the worst class of
usurers. A lawgiver who, from tenderness for laboring men, fixes the
hours of their work and the amount of their wages, is certain to make
them far more wretched than he found them. And so a government which,
not content with repressing scandalous excesses, demands from its
subjects fervent and austere piety, will soon discover that, while
attempting to render an impossible service to the cause of virtue, it
has in truth only promoted vice.

For what are the means by which a government can effect its ends? Two
only, reward and punishment; powerful means, indeed, for influencing the
exterior act, but altogether impotent for the purpose of touching the
heart. A public functionary who is told that he will be promoted if he
is a devout Catholic, and turned out of his place if he is not, will
probably go to mass every morning, exclude meat from his table on
Fridays, shrive himself regularly, and perhaps let his superiors know
that he wears a hair shirt next his skin. Under a Puritan government, a
person who is apprised that piety is essential to thriving in the world
will be strict in the observance of the Sunday, or, as he will call it,
Sabbath, and will avoid a theatre as if it were plague-stricken. Such a
show of religion as this the hope of gain and the fear of loss will
produce, at a week's notice, in any abundance which a government may
require. But under this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, and hatred
retain unimpaired power, and the seeming convert has only added to the
vices of a man of the world all the still darker vices which are
engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. The truth cannot
be long concealed. The public discovers that the grave persons who are
proposed to it as patterns are more utterly destitute of moral principle
and of moral sensibility than avowed libertines. It sees that these
Pharisees are farther removed from real goodness than publicans and
harlots. And, as usual, it rushes to the extreme opposite to that which
it quits. I