Daily Inspiration Quote by Ezra Stiles

The line lands like a calm pronouncement, but it’s doing political work with clerical confidence. Ezra Stiles isn’t marveling at China’s population for travelogue color; he’s using it as an argument-by-scale. If even “the two hundred million of the Chinese empire” can’t survive without “civil government,” then the case for government isn’t a local preference or a European habit. It’s pitched as a condition of human life under pressure: crowds require coordination, discipline, authority.

That phrasing - “cannot subsist” - is the tell. Stiles frames government less as a contract among equals than as a life-support system. The subtext is a warning to anyone flirting with anti-authoritarian fantasies: remove formal rule and you don’t get liberty; you get scarcity, disorder, collapse. And by choosing China, he reaches for the era’s most famous example of vast, continuous administration. China functions rhetorically as proof that bureaucracy is not decadence; it’s survival technology.

Context matters: Stiles is an 18th-century American clergyman writing in a moment when revolutionary rhetoric was lionizing “natural liberty” and distrust of centralized power. His sentence threads that needle. It doesn’t celebrate tyranny, but it quietly pushes back on the idea that virtue alone can govern a society. The clerical angle sharpens the implication: providence may order the universe, but on earth, large populations need institutions - law, courts, enforcement - not just sermons.