It appears to me, that in renouncing the efficacious aid of religion, we may easily form an idea of the means that they will endeavour to make use of to attach men to the observance of the rules of morality, and to restrain the dangerous excesses of their passions. They would, undoubtedly, place a proper value on the connection which subsists between private and general interest; they would avail themselves of the authority of laws, and the fear of punishment; and they would confide still more in the ascendency of public opinion, and the ambition, that every one ought to have, of gaining the esteem and confidence of his fellow-creatures. Let us examine separately these different motives; and first, attentively considering the union of private with public interest, let us see if this union is real, and if we can deduce from such a principle any moral instruction truly efficacious. Society is very far from being a perfect work; we ought not to consider as an harmonious composition the different relations of which we are witnesses, and particularly the habitual contrast of power and weakness, of slavery and authority, riches and poverty, of luxury and misery; so much inequality; such a motly piece could not form an edifice respectable for the justness of its proportions. Civil and political order is not then excellent by its nature, and we cannot perceive its agreement, till we have deeply studied, and formed to ourselves those reflections which legislators had to make, and the difficulties that they had to surmount. It is then only, with the assistance of the most attentive meditation, that we discover how those particular relations, which are established by social laws, form, nevertheless, that system of equilibrium, which is most proper to bind together an immense diversity of interests; but a great obstacle to the influence of political morality is, the necessity of giving, for the basis of the love of order, an abstract and complicated idea. What effect on vulgar minds would the scientific harmony of the whole have, opposed daily to the sentiment of injustice and inequality, which arises from the aspect of every part of the social constitution, when we acquire the knowledge of it, in a manner solitary and circumscribed; and how limited is the number of those, who can continually draw together all the scattered links of this vast chain!