lowering of interest is, as we see, the result of active trade. Thus, we will observe in passing that in order to know whether a nation that has no mines is engaging in as much commerce as others—relative to the respective facility that each has to engage in commerce—it is enough to compare the rates of interest in each. For it is certain that if the competition in these rates is not equal, there will be no equality in the external competition in sales and shipping.
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When, by these manifest signs, one perceives a constant increase in a state’s commerce, all of its parts act and transmit equal movement to each other; it enjoys the full vigor of which it is capable.
A similar situation is inseparable from great luxury. It extends over diverse classes of the people because they are all prosperous. But the luxury that produces public ease, through increase of work, is never to be feared; external competition constantly checks its excess, which would otherwise soon be the fateful end of all prosperity. Human industry then opens new routes; it perfects its methods and its works. Frugal use of time and energy in some sense multiplies men; needs give birth to the arts, competition lifts them up, and the artists’ wealth makes them knowledgeable.
Such are the prodigious effects of this principle of competition—so simple at first sight, as are virtually all the principles of commerce. This one in particular seems to me to have a very rare advantage, namely to be subject to no exceptions. This article is by M. V.D.F.
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Conquest †
CONQUEST (Law of nations), acquisition of sovereignty by the superior arms of a foreign prince, who forces the defeated to submit to his dominion.
It is very important to establish the just power of the right of conquest—its laws, its spirit, its effects—and the foundations of the sovereignty acquired in this manner. But in order not to get lost on dark and untrod paths from lack of illumination, I will take on enlightened guides, known to all the world, who have newly and attentively traversed these tricky routes and who, holding me by the hand, will prevent me from falling.1
The right of conquest may be defined as a necessary, legitimate, and unfortunate right, which always leaves an immense debt to be discharged if human nature is to be repaid.2
From the right of war derives that of conquest, which is its consequence.3 When a people is conquered, the right of the conqueror follows four sorts of laws: the law of nature, which makes everything tend toward the preservation of species; the law of natural enlightenment, which has us do to others what we would want to have done to us; the law that forms political societies, which are such that nature has not limited their duration; lastly, the law drawn from the thing itself.
Thus, a state that has conquered another treats it in one of these four ways: either it continues to govern its conquest according to its own laws and takes for itself only the exercise of the political and civil government;
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or it gives its conquest a new political and civil government; or it destroys the society and scatters its members off into other societies; or, finally, it exterminates all the citizens.
The first two ways conform to the law of nations that we presently follow.4 I would merely observe on the second that it is a risky enterprise on the conqueror’s part to want to give his laws and customs to the conquered people; there is no good in that, because one is capable of obeying in all sorts of governments. The last two ways5 conform to the law of nations among the Romans; on which, one can judge how much better we have become. Here homage must be paid to our modern times, to contemporary reasoning, to the religion of the present day, to our philosophy, to our mores. We know that conquest is an acquisition, and that the spirit of acquisition carries with it the spirit of preservation and use, not that of destruction.
When the authors of our public law, for whom ancient histories provided the foundation, have no longer followed cases strictly, they have lapsed into big mistakes.6 They have moved toward the arbitrary; they have presupposed among conquerors a right, I know not which one, of killing. This has made them draw consequences as terrible as the principle, and establish maxims that the conquerors themselves, when they have had the slightest sense, have never adopted. It is clear that, once the conquest is made, the conqueror no longer has the right to kill, because it is no longer for him a case of natural defense and of his own preservation.
What has made our political authors think this way is that they have believed the conqueror had the right to destroy the society; whence they have concluded that he had the right to destroy the men composing it, which is a consequence falsely drawn from a false principle. For it would not follow from the annihilation of the society that the men forming that society should also be annihilated. The society is the union of men and not the men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.
From the right to kill during conquest, political men have derived the right to reduce to servitude, but the consequence is as ill founded as the principle.
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One has the right to reduce a people to servitude only when it is necessary for the preservation of a conquest. The purpose of conquest is preservation. Servitude is never the purpose of conquest, but it is sometimes a necessary means for achieving preservation.
In this case, it is against the nature of the thing for this servitude to be eternal. It must be possible for the enslaved people to become subjects. Slavery is accidental to conquest. When, after a certain length of time, all the parts of the conquering state are bound to those of the conquered state by customs, marriage, laws, associations, and a certain conformity of spirit, servitude should cease. For the rights of the conqueror are founded only on the fact that these things do not exist and that there is a distance between the two nations, such that the one cannot trust the other.
Thus, the conqueror who reduces a people to servitude should always reserve for himself means—and these means are innumerable—for allowing them to leave it as soon as possible.7
These are not, adds M. Montesquieu, vague things here; these are principles, and our forefathers who conquered the Roman Empire put them in practice. They softened the laws that they had made in the heat, the activity, the impetuosity, the arrogance of victory; their laws had been hard, they made them impartial. The Burgundians, the Goths, and the Lombards always wanted the Romans to be the defeated people; the laws of Euric, of Gundobad, and of Rotharis made the barbarian and the Roman fellow citizens.
Instead of drawing such fatal consequences from the right of conquest, political men would have done better to speak of the advantages this right can sometimes confer on a vanquished people.8 They would have been more sensitive to these advantages if our law of nations were followed exactly and if it were established around the earth. Sometimes the frugality of the conquering nation has put it in position to leave the defeated people the necessities that their own prince had taken from them. One has seen states whose oppression by tax collectors was relieved by the conqueror, who had neither the commitments nor the needs of the legitimate prince.
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A conquest can destroy harmful prejudices, and, if one dares to say it, can put a nation under a better tutelary spirit. What good could the Spanish not have done for the Mexicans?
