LETTER CXLVI. Usbek to Rhedi, at Venice.

IT is a maxim of long standing, that sincerity is the soul of a great ministry. An individual may avail himself of the obscurity in which he is placed; his character is lessened only in the opinion of some particular persons; he keeps himself masked before others; but a minister, who acts contrary to the rules of probity, has witnesses of his bad conduct, and judges as many in number as the people he governs. Shall I hazard a bold assertion? The greatest mischief done by a minister without principle, does not arise from his serving his prince unfaithfully, or from his ruining

the people, it arises from the bad example he sets. You are not ignorant that I have a long time travelled up and down the Indies. I have there known a nation, by nature generous, debauched in an instant, as it were, by the bad example of a minister; I have seen a whole people, amongst whom generosity, probity, candour, and uprightness, had long been considered as qualities natural to them, become all on a sudden the most despicable people upon the face of the earth; I have seen the contagion spread, and not spare even the most sacred members of the community; I have known men famous for their virtue, guilty of the most unworthy actions; I have known them violate the first principles of justice, alledging in excuse, the frivolous pretext that they had been violated with respect to themselves. They justified the basest actions by odious laws, and made necessity a plea for their base and perfidious conduct. I have seen faith banished from contracts, the most solemn compacts rendered void, and all the laws of families subverted. I have seen avaritious debtors puffed up with pride, in the midst of poverty, unworthy instruments of the severity of the laws, and the public distress, pretend payment, without ever having made it, and plunge a dagger in the breast of their benefactors. I have seen others, still more unworthy, buy for a trifle, or rather, as it were, pick up oak leaves from the ground, in order to supply the place of the substance of widows and orphans. I have known an insatiable thirst for riches spring up on a sudden in the hearts of all men. I have seen a detestable confederacy formed by several persons to enrich themselves, not by an honest industry, but by the ruin of the prince, the state, and their fellow citizens. I have known a worthy citizen, in these times of distress, never go to bed without saying to himself, I have ruined a family to day, I will ruin another to-morrow. I am going, says another, with a man in black, who carries an inkhorn in his hand, to ruin all those to whom I have had an-obligation. Another said, I find I am beginning to thrive; true it is, when I went about three days ago to pay off some money, I left a whole family in tears, that I squandered the portions of two girls of condition, that I deprived a young lad of the means of acquiring education; his father will die of grief, his mother pines away with sorrow: but I have done nothing but what is allowed by the law. What crime can be greater, than that which a minister commits, when he corrupts the manners of a whole nation, debases the most noble souls, stains the lustre of dignities, makes virtue itself obscure, and confounds the noblest birth, in the general contempt? What will posterity say, when it finds itself under a necessity of blushing for the shame of its ancestors? What will the people of the next age say, when they compare the iron of their ancestors to the gold of those from whom they immediately derived their birth? I doubt not but the nobility will retrench from their coats of arms, an unworthy distinction, which dishonours them, and leave the present generation in the despicable state to which it has reduced itself.

Paris, the 11th of the moon Rhamazan,
1720.