When Bad Means Serve Good Ends — The Essays of Montaigne

There is wonderful relation and correspondence in the universal government of nature, which makes it appear that it is neither accidental nor carried on by divers masters. The diseases of our bodies are manifest in states and governments. Kingdoms and republics are founded, flourish, and decay with age as we do. We are subject to a repletion of humours, even of those that are good. Physicians, afraid of a too brisk perfection of health, prescribe wrestlers to purge and bleed. States are often sick of the like repletion. Families are turned out to clear the country and encroach upon others. So the ancient Franks came from the remotest part of Germany to seize Gaul. So Brennus led a deluge of men into Italy. So the Goths and Vandals, and the people who now possess Greece, left their native country for more room. The Romans erected colonies this way, easing a city grown immeasurably populous. They also purposely maintained wars, not only to keep their men in action, for fear idleness, the mother of corruption, should bring a worse inconvenience, but also as a blood-letting to the Republic, to evaporate the too vehement heat of their youth. To this end they maintained so long a war with Carthage.

In the treaty of Bretigny, Edward III would not comprehend the controversy about the Duchy of Brittany in the general peace, that he might have a place to discharge his soldiers, and that the vast number of English he had brought over might not return into England. King Philip consented to send his son John on a foreign expedition that he might take along a great number of hot young men then in his pay. Many in Montaigne's time wish the hot emotion among them might discharge itself in some neighbouring war, for fear the peccant humours of this politic body might diffuse farther and cause total ruin. A foreign war is much more supportable than a civil war, but he does not believe God will favour so unjust a design as to offend and quarrel with others for our own advantage.

And yet the weakness of our condition often pushes us upon the necessity of making use of ill means to a good end. Lycurgus, the most perfect legislator that ever was, invented the very unjust practice of making the helots drunk by force, so that the Spartans, seeing them lost and buried in wine, might abhor the excess of that vice. Still more to blame were those who of old gave leave that criminals, condemned to any sort of death, should be cut up alive by the physicians, that they might make a true discovery of our inward parts. If we must run into excesses, it is more excusable for the health of the soul than of the body. The Romans trained the people to valour and the contempt of death by furious spectacles of gladiators who cut, mangled, and killed one another until Theodosius. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand couples armed against one another were never heard to utter a syllable of weakness, never seen to turn their backs. Many, wounded to death, sent to ask the spectators if they were satisfied with their behaviour before they lay down to die upon the place. It was not enough to fight and die bravely, but cheerfully too; they were hissed if they hesitated. The very girls set them on. The first Romans condemned only criminals to this example; afterwards they employed innocent slaves, freemen who sold themselves, senators, knights, and also women. Montaigne should think that strange and incredible, if we were not accustomed every day to see in our own wars many thousands of men of other nations, for money, stake their blood and their lives in quarrels wherein they have no manner of concern.