"People of warm climates are timid, like old men; those of cold countries are courageous, like young ones."
We should take great care how general propositions escape us. No one has ever been able to make a Laplander or an Esquimaux warlike, while the Arabs in fourscore years conquered a territory which exceeded that of the whole Roman Empire. This maxim of M. Montesquieu is equally erroneous with all the rest on the subject of climate.
"Louis XIII. was extremely averse to passing a law which made the negroes of the French colonies slaves; but when he was given to understand that it was the most certain way of converting them, he consented."
Where did the author pick up this anecdote? The first arrangement for the treatment of the negroes was made in 1673, thirty years after the death of Louis XIII. This resembles the refusal of Francis I. to listen to the project of Christopher Columbus, who had discovered the Antilles before Francis I. was born.
"The Romans never exhibited any jealousy on the score of commerce. It was as a rival, not as a commercial nation, that they attacked Carthage."
It was both as a warlike and as a commercial nation, as the learned Huet proves in his "Commerce of the Ancients," when he shows that the Romans were addicted to commerce a long time before the first Punic war.
"The sterility of the territory of Athens established a popular government there, and the fertility of that of Lacedæmon an aristocratic one."
Whence this chimera? From enslaved Athens we still derive cotton, silk, rice, corn, oil, and skins; and from the country of Lacedæmon nothing. Athens was twenty times richer than Lacedæmon. With respect to the comparative fertility of the soil, it is necessary to visit those countries to appreciate it; but the form of a government is never attributed to the greater or less fertility. Venice had very little corn when her nobles governed. Genoa is assuredly not fertile, and yet is an aristocracy. Geneva is a more popular state, and has not the means of existing a fortnight upon its own productions. Sweden, which is equally poor, has for a long time submitted to the yoke of a monarchy; while fertile Poland is aristocratic. I cannot conceive how general rules can be established, which may be falsified upon the slightest appeal to experience.