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01.08(comments)
01.08(comments)
Politics have become discredited by the employment of culpable expedients and the adoption of immoral maxims; for their reputation to be retrieved they must be brought into accord with morality. 【After having resorted for so long to cunning and falsehood, to intrigue and violence, politics, were it only for the novelty of the thing, should try the effect of fair dealing, tolerance, and justice.】Today, more than at any period, novelty is liked. And what greater novelty could there be than politics conducted on moral lines? It is possible that people will end by recognizing that in public as in private life honesty is the most effective and the most skilful policy. 【Not only should Machiavellism be loathed by honorable people, but it should be regarded as fatal to the true interests of nations.】A great policy cannot be immoral. Craft and violence may score ephemeral successes, but they do not assure the greatness and prosperity of a country. The successes achieved by an immoral policy are not lasting; sooner or later nations, like individuals, politicians, just as private persons, are punished for the evil or rewarded for the good they do. Political crimes are punished more often than is supposed. Those who put their adversaries to death by poison or upon the scaffold often undergo a like fate; those who send others into exile are exiled in their turn.
embark upon（开始，从事，着手）
Liberty is not to be imposed by the guillotine; fraternity is not established by the extermination of its adversaries; the reign of justice and equality is not founded by popular or judicial massacres.
The disciples of Machiavelli declare that politicians should resort to violence（用暴力，动武） and even to crime, if to do so be necessary for the safety of the people, but what they call the safety of the people is often nothing more than（仅仅，只不过） the safety of their rule. The authors of the 18th Fructidor, who carried out that coup d’état（政变） under pretext of saving the Republic, violated the law solely with a view to escaping a personal danger; and far from saving the Republic, by demanding the intervention of a general they created a precedent for the 18th Brumaire. 【The public safety is an excuse for all violence and every iniquity. Moreover, when a political crime is really committed to assure the safety of the people, there is no proof that the crime is necessary, or that the people might not have been saved by other means.】【The safety of the people lies rather in respect for legality than in its violation.】【A people that does its duty can await the future with confidence; if it suffers for the moment in the cause of justice it is rare that the day of reparation does not dawn, for in the case of nations, as in that of individuals, it is virtues that elevate them and vices that debase them.】
A Machiavellian policy is not a great policy; to practice it a great genius is not necessary. It is easier to govern by expedients than by principles. What is more, there has ceased to be（不再是） any necessity for a policy of this sort in modern societies. 【It is comprehensible that Machiavelli's prince, that is to say, an absolute sovereign, should find it to his interest to sow division among his subjects in order to rule them; on the other hand, the maxim, "Promote division in order to reign," is out of place in a free Government that is supported by opinion and whose interest it is to unite and not to divide the community.】Terror may be an instrument of government for a popular or military dictator, but it becomes inapplicable under a government of opinion. This being the case, instead of saying, as under the old system of politics, "Cunning（adj. n.）, still cunning, and always cunning; audacity, again audacity, and always audacity," the watchword（暗语, [军]口令, 标语, 口号, 格言） ought to be under the modern system of politics, "Straightforwardness, still straightforwardness, and always straightforwardness; justice, still justice, and always justice."
Diplomatic dissimulation becomes more difficult with the publication of parliamentary debates（议会辩论记录文件）. This publicity, which has its inconveniences, offers the advantage that it is profitable to morality. It is impossible for a Minister to confess in a public discussion that he harbors unjust projects. Moreover, as public opinion becomes more enlightened, and acquires greater weight, its sound common sense takes the place of the finessing of the diplomatists. A crafty policy is not always the most skilful. Henry IV. did not have recourse to（求助于，求援于） craft. A diplomatist who is in ¬the habit of resorting to（诉诸于，采取） falsehood ceases to inspire confidence and at once loses the greater part of his authority.
A policy based upon immorality is antiquated and unworthy of modern society; it pre-supposes contempt for humanity, and an antagonism that ought not to exist between those who govern and those who are governed. The policy of free peoples ought not to resemble the policy of absolute sovereigns; it is founded upon the respect of legality.
Whatever the skeptics may say, craft and violence are not necessities of politics. As society becomes more enlightened, politics may attain to greater perfection. Corruption is not an indispensable method of government: liberty can exist without license, it is allowable to hope for a state of things in which the administration will be impartial, the legislation equitable, the elections sincere, and in which industry and merit will be rewarded. 【The European Governments show better faith in respect to their financial engagements at the present day than in the past; they are conscious that it is to their interest not to tamper with（损害, 篡改, 贿赂, 影响, 瞎搞） their coinage, and not to go bankrupt, and for the reason that public confidence in their credit is their principal force.】 Why should they not arrive at understanding that they ought to have the same respect for liberty and human life as for the public debt?
The progress of public reasonableness is most of all to be counted upon（仰赖） to render politics more straightforward and more in accordance with（与…一致，依照） equity. Politicians, assemblies, and sovereigns, knowing that they will be called upon to give an exact account of their conduct before the tribunal of public opinion, will become more circumspect in the employment of expedients of a kind to arouse public indignation（愤慨，义愤）. 【Politics should serve an educational purpose as well as maintain order and protect material interests（物质利益）. Men are governed by ideas and sentiments as well as by appeals to their interests and to force.】 A lofty sentiment does not spoil politics. The great advances made in the sphere of politics have been advances of a philosophical order and have been due to an application of Christian philosophy. Unprincipled politics are Pagan politics, and their result is not the progress of society. 【The true policy consists in（存在于） an application of reason to the affairs of the State.】
【Skepticism has brought into existence at the present day a generation of politicians who set more store upon palpable realities than upon principles.】A policy of expedients and of vulgar satisfactions is the outcome of skepticism. The change that has taken place in our political morals has deep and remote causes（远因）. A people that used to be chivalrous, that despised money, that was fired with ardor for noble causes, now for political liberty, now for military glory, does not become positively skeptical, indifferent to principles, and attached to material interests in a day. / This change of character is the result of the numerous deceptions it has experienced, of the frequent revolutions it has undergone, but also of the weakening of spiritual beliefs.
"When a republic is corrupt," says Montesquieu, "none of the evils that crop up（突然出现） can be remedied, except by removing the corruption and reinstating principles; any other corrective is useless or a fresh evil." The suppression of the parliamentary regime would not be a remedy; the establishment of a dictatorship（专权） would be a fresh evil and a worse evil. The true remedy consists in a return to principles. Politics, like human life, need to be spiritualized unless they are to fall into the mire and to remain there. To change the persons composing the political world would be insufficient, unless a moral reform be affected at the same time. Clearly if the new politicians were as devoid of（缺少） principles as the old, all that would have been done would have been to exchange fat for lean kine, who in turn would wish to wax fat. Between fatted skeptics and lean skeptics the difference is but slight, or if there be any difference it is rather in favor of the former. Obviously satiated skeptics are less dangerous than skeptics whose appetites are keen, because it may be hoped that, having looked after their own interests, they will at last look after those of the country. This, according to Saint Simon, was the cynical remark made by Maison when the direction of the finances was taken from him. "They are making a mistake," he exclaimed, "for I had looked after my own interests and was going to look after theirs."
A return to principles and moral beliefs and the substitution of ideas for appetites are, in consequence, the true remedies for that hideous malady political corruption. It is only in the power of great passions to drive petty passions from the field. 【As long as noble sentiments, love of country and of liberty and purifying beliefs, are not revived in a country the parliamentary atmosphere will remain vitiated.】
Doubtless to exercise authority it is not sufficient to be above（不易受到…，不屑于，超出…之外） reproach; a clear intellect, tact, and experience are necessary. Talent, however, without morality is insufficient, and mere intelligence is no preservative against moral backslidings. Nobody would entrust his daughters or his fortune to the care of a clever but dissolute and extravagant man. Why then confide the country and the public fortune to the care of men of pleasure, who easily develop into men whose sole concern is money? When a money- and pleasure-loving man declares himself a friend of the people, who can believe in his sincerity? 【Affection is not proved by words, but by acts. The true sentiments of politicians are not to be judged by their professions of faith or their humanitarian speeches, but by their character and their habitual conduct.】The probity（正直） expected of the head of a Government involves not only his own personal integrity, but the choice on his part of men of integrity for his Ministers. "If we would pass for men of integrity," says Cicero, "we should not only display probity ourselves, but exact it of those about us."
Statesmen（政治家） would avoid many political errors if they were more respectful of justice; their political errors are often moral errors; their good sense and their skillfulness suffer in proportion as they swerve from the dictates of equity: they abandon themselves to passions that cloud their intelligence. Just ideas and wise resolutions are inspired by an upright conscience, whose qualities influence the intelligence. To be a man of good sense it is sufficient to be an honest man.
【By again becoming moral, politics would be brought back into unison with common-sense, and would be cured of（复原） two serious diseases called the Socialist madness and the Anarchist madness that are the result of the sophisms（诡辩） by which we are inundated, and of the letting loose of evil passions.】We lack reasonableness at the present day; our brains are disordered; our good sense, a quality that used to be particularly distinctive of the French, has been affected by innumerable philosophical, economical, and political sophisms that reach us from Germany, Italy, England, the East, and even from India. Good sense has ceased to guide our thoughts and actions since we have adopted German pessimism and socialism, English evolutionism, Italian skepticism, Russian Nihilism, and Asiatic Buddhism. Let us become Frenchmen again and Christians, let us return to the school of good sense and morality.
The malady from which contemporary society suffers is a moral disease rather than a political or economical disease. 【It is doubtless useful to improve institutions and to reform abuses but how much more necessary it is to reform morals and to give tone to men's minds by healthy ideas and moral beliefs.】If society is to be saved from the corruption by which it is invaded, and from the revolutionary barbarism by which it is threatened, spiritualist（唯心论者, 巫师） teachings must be restored to the place they formerly occupied in men's minds and in politics; this is the only way to save them from the clutches of envy and hatred.
The sentiment of duty and of personal responsibility must be re-established in the public mind and in the education of the young. 【It is necessary to fight against the sophisms which lead to the absorption of the individual by the State, and to the conversion of every citizen into a part of a colossal machine that produces wealth and distributes it according to each man's needs. 】The true remedy for the crises we are traversing is a return to the old morality, which teaches that working-men in common with（和…一样） their employers are intended to do their duty, and to labor, and have their responsibilities. / What other doctrine will teach the rich the spirit of sacrifice, and the voluntary renunciation of what is superfluous, and the poor the obligation of personal effort, the merit of patience, and respect for legality?
【It is not by encouraging atheism and materialism that a Government effects an improvement in morals, that it stills passions and relieves wretchedness.】【Hostility to religion is contrary to sound politics.】 【Merely from the utilitarian point of view the blindness and perversity are incomparable of those incredulous fanatics who would rob their fellows of the beliefs in which they find consolation.】Who can deny that the religious sentiment conduces to（导致，有助于） morality? The more religious citizens there are in a State, the fewer are the restless spirits, the Socialists and the Anarchists. In a period of skepticism, materialism, positivism, evolutionism, and nihilism, who can dream of denying the immense services rendered by Christianity in inculcating the dignity of human nature and the obligatory character of duty, and in opposing the worship of an ideal to the worship of the golden calf? In a society in which there is talk of nothing else but of the struggle for life, of the rights conferred by might, of the elimination of the weak, of the disgrace of poverty, of the all-powerfulness of wealth, religion teaches self-sacrifice, respect, and love for the poor, and responsibility before God and before the conscience. At a period in which Socialism, grown more and more threatening, demands that the State should be omnipotent, Christianity again performs a useful work in standing out for（[口](为等待更好时机)拖延时间，坚持，坚决要求） the rights of the human being and the rights of the conscience, and in setting limits to the action of the State. If spiritual beliefs were not regaining ¬their hold over（拖延, 继任, 以...威胁） men's minds one would be forced to tremble for the future of society, for "there comes a day when truths that have been scorned announce themselves by thunder-claps."
Nations, too, in their mutual relations（相互关系）, have every interest not to separate politics from morality. A sound policy, no less than morality, dictates to them justice and charitableness, which are alone capable of preserving peace and with it the benefits it carries in its train. 【The policy that teaches nations that they should envy, hate, and injure each other, that their conduct should be solely guided by their interests, and that the difficulties that crop up between them should be settled by force alone, such a policy is criminal and mistaken. 【The statesmen who counsel this narrow and egoistical, this envious and malevolent policy, are shortsighted, they are merely alive to the interests of the moment that are a source of division, but they are blind to（对…视而不见，看不懂） the interests which the peoples have in common, and above all to the disastrous consequences of antagonism and war; they do not keep in view the benefits of peace and the horrors of war.】
How far preferable to an envious and ambitious policy that divides nations would be a just, friendly, and moderate policy that would bring them together! How far happier the nations would be if they would cease to lend themselves to a revengeful and high-handed（高压的, 横暴的, 不容分说的） policy! What a pitch of prosperity Europe would have reached if, realizing the project of Henry IV., it had applied to politics the rules of good sense and Christian morality. The aspect of the world would be changed if the nations, considering themselves members of the same family, would banish violence and craft from their councils. The policy of Christian peoples is still Pagan: it must become Christian if the world is to enjoy peace.
Carried away by his somewhat excessive enthusiasm for military glory, M. Thiers has remarked: “What purpose would the strength of nations serve if it were not expended in attempts to gain the mastery over each other?" 【It seems to me, however, that the strength of nations might be more usefully employed than in realizing dreams of conquest, which are so dearly paid for in money and blood, and which end in disasters and catastrophes. Every time that a nation has sought to conquer other nations, it has caused torrents of blood to flow without profit to itself. All those who have entertained dreams of conquest have met with failure. To establish their supremacy Charles V. and Napoleon I. caused millions of men to perish, and they were unable to attain their goal: the former died in a convent, the latter on the rocks of Saint Helena; Spain and France were ruined by their ambitious policy. To how many conquerors may not these words of the Bible be applied: "The hammer that shattered the nations of the universe has itself been broken in pieces."】
A policy that aims at international equilibrium（国际均势） ¬is better than a policy of conquest. Empires that are too vast cannot last; they succumb, sooner or later, to a coalition between the other nations. That one nation should rule over another is always a danger to the common liberty, for a nation that is too powerful, like a too powerful sovereign, has a difficulty in keeping within the limits of a wise moderation. If the desire for domination be of value as a motive force in politics, why should not moral domination achieved through science, literature, and institutions be made the object of the activity of nations?
Skeptics are disposed to smile when they hear moralists express the hope that international wars will cease, and that arbitration will take the place of recourse to force. 【Lord Salisbury, however, who at one time considered this hope a dream, is now of opinion that it is realizable. "Civilization," he has said, "has substituted law court decisions for duels between private persons and conflicts between the great. International wars are destined in the same way to give place to the courts of arbitration of a more advanced civilization."】 In 1883 Switzerland and the ¬United States pledged themselves to submit to a court of arbitration all difficulties arising between them during a period of thirty years. In 1888 France contracted a similar engagement with the Equatorial Republic. In 1890 the plenipotentiaries（n.全权大使 adj.有全权的） of seventeen American Republics, assembled at Washington, admitted the principle of permanent arbitration.
【It may be hoped, in consequence, that war will become rarer and rarer in proportion to（与…成比例） the progress of civilization and of the moral and economical solidarity existing between different nations. The new engines of war, the destructive force of which augments every day, also contribute to the maintenance of peace, because peoples and sovereigns recoil in terror from the frightful consequences of a war waged with such formidable engines of destruction. The tendency of public opinion is more and more to compel Governments to maintain peace. It may be hoped in consequence that war, which is already more civilized, will become of rare occurrence.】
Still, as peoples and sovereigns have a tendency to become intoxicated by success, historians and moralists ought to unite their efforts to combat their unruly impulses. 【Historians, who habitually admire success, too often forget, when narrating wars, to inquire into（探究） their morality and utility; they almost always exalt the conquerors, and in this way corrupt public opinion, by accustoming it to allow itself to be dazzled by success.】 They should keep a little of the admiration they lavish upon conquerors for the upright men who have given evidence of their love of humanity and of their respect for human life.
【As to the moralists, it is necessary that they should unceasingly combat the sophisms of immoral politics by declaring that reasons of State are the negation of reason; that the object of government is not to divide but to unite; that the lesser morality does not destroy the higher morality, because there are not two moralities; that public safety lies in justice alone: that the end does not justify the means; that illegitimate means result in the end being unattained; that right is superior to might; that justice is the supreme law; that the maxim that right is on the side of the strongest is a maxim good enough for wolves but not for men.】
Science without conscience, Rabelais has said, is the ruin of the soul. Politics without morality are the ruin of society.
Comments:
Admittedly, this article, as far as I am concerned, is excellent and compelling, which is mainly on politics. In this passage, the author talks about his comprehension on the relation of the moral and politics. The character of high moral, such as straightforwardness, sincerity, from the speaker’s opinion, is more crucial and helpful than craft or cunning for statesmen in adressing politaical problems or remedying their political errors. Allow me to coin a sentence in the article: “The true sentiments of politicians are not to be judged by their professions of faith or their humanitarian speeches, but by their character and their habitual conduct.”
Furthermore, the passage contains so many points for me to learn from, including effective and profuse vocabularies, sentence varity, except insightful opinion. |
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楼主: qxn_1987
发表于 2010-1-7 23:33:25
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