The Social Contract - 20zy
---Chapter xii:How Sovereign Authority Is Maintained---
★★★In moral matters the limits of the possible are less
narrow than we think: it is our weaknesses, our vices,
and our prejudices that reduce them（moral matters）.
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Low minds do not believe in great men;
worthless slaves smile in mockery at the word liberty.
---Chapter xiii : The Same Continued---
★complimentary免费的/表示赞许的！
★complementary互补的！
Spread the population evenly★均匀地 through your territory,
extend the same rights everywhere, and everywhere bring life
and abundance: this is the way to make the state as strong
and as well governed as possible.
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Remember that town walls are always built from the ruins
of houses that stood in fields.Whenever I see a palace being
built in a capital city, I seem to see a whole country
reduced to living in hovels茅舍.
---Chapter xiv : The Same Continued---
★If the people is grasping★贪婪的, faint-hearted懦弱的,
and cowardly,fonder of leisure安逸 than of liberty, it will
not hold out for long against constant pressure from
the government;
---Chapter xv:Deputies代表 or Representatives---
As soon as serving the public is no longer the main concern
of the citizens, and they prefer not to give service themselves,
but to use their purses钱包, the state is already near to ruin.
-
Is there a battle to be fought?—they pay for troops and stay at home;
are public decisions to be made?—they choose deputies and
stay at home.
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Through being lazy and having money, they end
up with soldiers to oppress压迫 their country and
representatives to sell it.
Service done in person is changed into money because
people are busy with their trade or craft, greedily self-interested
for profit, lovers of comfort and material possessions
★★★Pay out money, and soon you will be in chains.
The word finance is for slaves, it is unknown in a real state.
-
In a truly free state, the citizens do everything with
their own hands, and nothing with money: far from paying
in order to be exempted from their duties, they would pay
in order to carry them out themselves.
I believe that taxes are more contrary to freedom than the
enforced labour of the corvee[法]强制劳役. ??????
The people's deputies are not its representatives,
therefore, nor can they be, but are only its
agents; they cannot make definitive决定性的 decisions.
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Any law that the people in person has not ratified认可
is void; it is not a law.
-★★★
The people of England believes itself to be free; it is
quite wrong: it is free only during the elections of
Members of Parliament. Once they are elected, the people
is enslaved, it is nothing.
The idea of representation★表现 is modern: it came from
feudalism, that unjust and absurd form of government
which degrades降低/贬低 the human race, and under which the
name of man was dishonourable.(使“人”这个名字不光彩)
-
In the ancient republics, and even monarchies,
the people never had representatives: the word
itself was unknown.
-
It is a most remarkable thing that in Rome, where
the tribunes护民官 were so sacred, no one ever imagined that
they might usurp the functions of the people, and that, even
surrounded as they were by so great a multitude, they never
once tried to hold a plebiscite平民表决 on their own authority.
Everything that is not natural has its disadvantages,
and civil society more than anything else.
(而文明社会尤甚)
-
There are some unhappy situations in which one's
liberty can be kept only at the expense of another's, and
the citizen can be perfectly free only if the slave is
in complete servitude. Such was the position in ★Sparta.
-？？？
As for you, the modern nations, you have no slaves, but are
enslaved; you are paying for their freedom with yours. It is
all very well to boast自夸 that this is an improvement; I find
it cowardly rather than humane.
The moment that a people★民族
provides itself with representatives,
it is no longer free; it no longer exists.
