Why do we scarcely ever know the tenth part of the good we might do? Iris clear, that if a nation living between the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the sea, had employed, in ameliorating and embellishing the country, a tenth part of the money it lost in the war of 1741, and one-half of the men killed to no purpose in Germany, the state would have been more flourishing. Why was not this done? Why prefer a war, which Europe considered unjust, to the happy labors of peace, which would have produced the useful and the agreeable? Why did Louis XIV., who had so much taste for great monuments, for new foundations, for the fine arts, lose eight hundred millions of our money in seeing his cuirassiers and his household swim across the Rhine in _not_ taking Amsterdam; in stirring up nearly all Europe against him? What could he not have done with his eight hundred millions? Why, when he reformed jurisprudence, did he reform it only by halves? Ought the numerous ancient customs, founded on the decretals and the canon law, to be still suffered to exist? Was it necessary that in the many causes called ecclesiastical, but which are in reality civil, appeal should be made to the bishop; from the bishop to the metropolitan; from the metropolitan to the primate; and from the primate to Rome, "_ad apostolos_"?--as if the apostles had of old been the judges of the Gauls "_en dernier ressort_." Why, when Louis XIV. was outrageously insulted by Pope Alexander VII.--Chigi--did he amuse himself with sending into France for a legate, to make frivolous excuses, and with having a pyramid erected at Rome, the inscriptions over which concerned none but the watchmen of Rome--a pyramid which he soon after had abolished? Had it not been better to have abolished forever the simony by which every bishop and every abbot in Gaul pays to the Italian apostolic chamber the half of his revenue? Why did the same monarch, when still more grievously insulted by Innocent XI.--Odescalchi--who took the part of the prince of Orange against him, content himself with having four propositions maintained in his universities, and refuse the prayers of the whole magistracy, who solicited an eternal rupture with the court of Rome? Why, in making the laws, was it forgotten to place all the provinces of the kingdom under one uniform law, leaving in existence a hundred different customs, and a hundred and forty-four different measures? Why were the provinces of this kingdom still reputed foreign to one another, so that the merchandise of Normandy, on being conveyed by land into Brittany, pays duty, as if it came from England? Why was not corn grown in Champagne allowed to be sold in Picardy without an express permission--as at Rome permission is obtained for three giuli to read forbidden books?