s in cutting out for them
their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and
latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but
fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling
us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find
the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than
to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in
commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for we
have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and
more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of
Epicurus:

"Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus."

["As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by
laws."--Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]

and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judges
that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What have
our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular
cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This number
holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human
actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the
variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will
still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that,
in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall
so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with
it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will
require a diverse judgment. There is little relation betwixt our
actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws;
the most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple
and general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all
than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.

Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make ourselves;
witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the state wherein
we see nations live who have no other. Some there are, who for their
only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains,
to determine their cause; and others who, on their market day, choose out
some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their controversies. What
danger would there be that the wisest amongs