CHAPTER VIII.
AMELIORATION OF MORALS.
The last means which States are wont to employ, in order to reform the moral condition of the nation correspondently with their design of maintaining security, is the influence of special laws and enactments. But as these cannot be made to induce any direct disposition towards virtue and morality, it manifestly follows that special provisions of this nature can do nothing more than prohibit particular actions of the citizens, or mark out those which, without directly infringing on the rights of others, are either positively immoral or are likely to lead to immorality.
To this class of institutions all sumptuary laws especially belong. For, it is evident, there is no such common and fruitful source of immoral, and even lawless actions, as an excessive propensity of the soul towards the sensual, or the disproportion subsisting between desires and impulses in general, and the powers of satisfaction which the external position affords. When there exists a general spirit of continence and moderation, which serves to reconcile men to their allotted sphere, they are not so strongly impelled to transgress its limits to the infraction of another's rights, or, at least, to do anything likely to disturb their own happiness and contentment.
Hence it would seem to be strictly consistent with the true end of the State, to confine sensualism within due bounds, since it is the essential source from which all collisions between man and man proceed (for that in which the
