have, beyond doubt, witnessed an execution in that country; you have
noted, even where the criminal is consoled by religion, how he trembles,
and shrinks,--how dejected, how prostrate of heart he is before the doom
is completed. Take now the vilest slave, either of the Emperor of
Morocco or the great Czar of Russia. He changes neither tint nor
muscle; he requires no consolation; he shrinks from no torture. What is
the inference? /That slaves dread death less than the free/. And it
should be so. The end of legislation is not to make /death/, but
/life/, a blessing."

"You have put the matter in a new light," said the Czar; but you allow
that, in individuals, contempt of death is sometimes a virtue."

"Yes, when it springs from mental reasonings, not physical indifference.
But your Majesty has already put in action one vast spring of a system
which will ultimately open to your subjects so many paths of existence
that they will preserve contempt for its proper objects, and not lavish
it solely, as they do now, on the degradation which sullies life and the
axe that ends it. You have already begun the conquest of another and a
most vital error in the philosophy of the ancients,--that philosophy
taught that man should have few wants, and made it a crime to increase
and a virtue to reduce them. A legislator should teach, on the
contrary, that man should have many wants: for wants are not only the
sources of enjoyment,--they are the sources of improvement; and that
nation will be the most enlightened among whose populace they are found
the most numerous. You, Sire, by circulating the arts, the graces,
create a vast herd of moral wants hitherto unknown, and in those wants
will hereafter be found the prosperity of your people, the fountain of
your resources, and the strength of your empire."