LETTER CXIX. Usbek to the Same.

SOMETIMES the fruitfulness of a people depends upon the minutest circumstances in the world; in such a manner that often nothing is necessary but a new turn in the imagination, to render them much more numerous than they were. The Jews so frequently exterminated, and always multiplying, have repaired their continual losses and destructions, by this single hope, which reigns amongst all their families, of seeing the birth of a powerful king, who shall be lord of the whole earth. The ancient kings of Persia had not had so many thousand subjects, but on account of this dogma in the religion of the Magi, that the most pleasing acts to God that men can do, are, to get a child, manure a field, and to plant a tree. If China contains such a prodigious number of people, it arises only from a certain way of thinking: for as the children regard their

fathers as Gods, whom they respect as such in this life, whom they honour after their deaths by sacrifices, in that they believe that their souls extinguished in the Tyen The original is very obscure; ancantes: dans le Tyen.—As by Tyen, the Chinese not only mean the Sovereign Lord of all things, but also call the father of a family Tyen; perhaps the sense of the passage is this; ‘they believe that their parents souls extinct in the Tyen,’ that is, in the father, ‘resume a new life.’ I hazard this conjecture, and if mistaken, should be glad of better information from any intelligent reader. ^†349, resume a new life; every one therefore is induced to increase a family so dutiful in this life, and so necessary in the next. On the contrary, the countries of the Mahometans every day become deserts, from an opinion, which, all holy as it is, yet is not without very hurtful consequences, when it is rooted in the mind. We should consider ourselves as travellers who ought to have all our thoughts fixed upon another country: but all useful and permanent labours, every care to secure fortunes for our children, schemes which reach beyond this short and transitory life, appear as things extravagant. Indolent to the present, and unsolicitous for what is to come, we take no trouble to repair public buildings, to clear uncultivated lands, nor to manure those that are deserving of our cares; we live in a general state of insensibility, and leave every thing to be done by Providence. It was a spirit of vanity that established among the Europeans the unjust law of primogeniture, so unfavourable to propagation, in that it directs the attention of a father to only one of his children, and turns his eyes from all the others; in that it obliges him, in order to make a solid fortune for one only, to hinder the settlement of the rest; lastly, in that it destroys the equality of citizens, which constitutes all their wealth.

Paris, the 4th of the moon Rhamazan,
1717.