encourages, and has sometimes enabled, one
Englishman in reality to beat two.

A Frenchman ventures, his life with alacrity 'pour l'honneur du Roi';
were you to change the object, which he has been taught to have in view,
and tell him that it was 'pour le bien de la Patrie', he would very
probably run away. Such gross local prejudices prevail with the herd of
mankind, and do not impose upon cultivated, informed, and reflecting
minds. But then they are notions equally false, though not so glaringly
absurd, which are entertained by people of superior and improved
understandings, merely for want of the necessary pains to investigate,
the proper attention to examine, and the penetration requisite to
determine the truth. Those are the prejudices which I would have you
guard against by a manly exertion and attention of your reasoning
faculty. To mention one instance of a thousand that I could give you: It
is a general prejudice, and has been propagated for these sixteen hundred
years, that arts and sciences cannot flourish under an absolute
government; and that genius must necessarily be cramped where freedom is
restrained. This sounds plausible, but is false in fact. Mechanic arts,
as agriculture, etc., will indeed be discouraged where the profits and
property are, from the nature of the government, insecure. But why the
despotism of a government should cramp the genius of a mathematician, an
astronomer, a poet, or an orator, I confess I never could discover. It
may indeed deprive the poet or the orator of the liberty of treating of
certain subjects in the manner they would wish, but it leaves them
subjects enough to exert genius upon, if they have it. Can an author with
reason complain that he is cramped and shackled, if he is not at liberty
to publish blasphemy, bawdry, or sedition? all which are equally
prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well regulated
ones. This is the present general complaint of the French authors; but
indeed chiefly of the bad ones. No wonder, say they, that England
produces so many great geniuses; people there may think as they please,
and publish what they think. Very true, but what hinders them from
thinking as they please? If indeed they think in manner destructive of
all religion, morality, or good manners, or to the disturbance of the
state, an absolute government will certainly more effectually prohibit
them from, or punish them for publishing such thoughts, than a free o