A friend was saying one day that it was puzzling nowadays to talk to Americans. We recalled Baron de Montesquieu, whose ideas were so congenial to the founders of the United States. When he wanted to mock Louis XIV and speak hard reality to the French, he wrote The Persian Letters in the guise of a Persian in Paris. I feared that what I would write might be either simpleminded or too abstract to be suffered by a reader. Also I should have to specify what was bad for my compatriots, and what was good, and what might be better still, because I detest the way in which writers about America tear the place to the ground and then walk off.
Lectures are for others.
These are lectures to the Chinese. The contradictory scheme of the eight bads and the eight goods emerged. The Chinese classics, written before the First Empire of 221 B.C., replace the Western philosophers as sources of illumination. Many Chinese have read them, but I wonder whether the Chinese will ever hear the lectures. It doesn't matter.