B. Decidedly, you are a frightful grumbler. What interest can the
State have in mystifying people's intellects in favour of revolutions,
and civil and foreign wars? There must certainly be a great deal of
exaggeration in what you say.
F. Consider. At the period when our intellectual faculties begin to
develop themselves, at the age when impressions are liveliest, when
habits of mind are formed with the greatest ease--when we might look at
society and understand it--in a word, as soon as we are seven or eight
years old, what does the State do? It puts a bandage over our eyes,
takes us gently from the midst of the social circle which surrounds us,
to plunge us, with our susceptible faculties, our impressible hearts,
into the midst of Roman society. It keeps us there for ten years at
least, long enough to make an ineffaceable impression on the brain. Now
observe, that Roman society is directly opposed to what our society
ought to be. There they lived upon war; here we ought to hate war. There
they hated labour; here we ought to live upon labour. There the means of
subsistence were founded upon slavery and plunder; here they should be
drawn from free industry. Roman society was organised in consequence of
its principle. It necessarily admired what made it prosper. There they
considered as virtue, what we look upon as vice.
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