7 6z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It just suited the " philosophes," male and female, interchanging 

 their airy epigrams in salons, which had about as much likeness 

 to the Academy or to the Stoa, as the " philosophes " had to the 

 philosophers of antiquity. 



I do not forget the existence of men of the type of Montesquieu 

 or D'Argenson in the France of the eighteenth century, when I 

 take this as a fair representation of the enlightened public of that 

 day. The unenlightened public, on the other hand, the people 

 who were morally and physically debased by sheer hunger; or 

 those, not so far dulled or infuriated by absolute want, who yet 

 were maddened by the wrongs of every description inflicted upon 

 them by a political system which, so far as its proper object, the 

 welfare of the people, was concerned, was effete and powerless ; 

 the subjects of a government smitten with paralysis for every- 

 thing but the working of iniquity and the generation of scandals ; 

 these naturally hailed with rapture the appearance of the teacher 

 who clothed passion in the garb of philosophy ; and preached the 

 sweeping away of injustice by the perpetration of further injus- 

 tice, as if it were nothing but the conversion of sound theory into 

 practice. 



It is true that any one who has looked below the surface * will 

 hardly be disposed to join in the cry which is so often raised 

 against the " philosophes " that their " infidel and leveling " 

 principles brought about the French Revolution. People, like 

 the Marquis d'Argenson, with political eyes in their heads, saw 

 that the revolution was inevitable before Rousseau wrote a line. 

 In truth, the Bull " Unigenitus," the interested restiveness of the 

 Parliaments, and the extravagancies and profligacy of the court 

 had a great deal more influence in generating the catastrophe 

 than all the " philosophes " that ever put pen to paper. But, un- 

 doubtedly, Rousseau's extremely attractive and widely read writ- 

 ings did a great deal to give a color of rationality to those princi- 

 ples of '89 f which, even after the lapse of a century, are considered 



positive law, impatience of experience, and the preference of a priori to all other reason- 

 ing " (pp. 89-92). I shall often have to quote " Ancient Law." The first edition of this 

 admirable book was published in 1861, but now, after eighteen years of growing influence 

 on thoughtful men, it seems to be forgotten, or willfully ignored, by the ruck of political 

 speculators. It is enough to make one despair of the future that Demos and the Bourbons 

 seem to be much alike in their want of capacity for either learning or forgetting. 



* Those who desire to do so with ease and pleasure should read M. Rocquain's " L'esprit 

 r6volutionnaire en France avant la Revolution." It is really a luminous book, which ought 

 to be translated for the benefit of our rising public men, who, having had the advantage of 

 a public-school education, are so often unable to read French with comfort. For deeper 

 students there is, of course, the great work of M. Taine, " Les origines de la France con- 

 temporaine." 



f Sir H. Maine observes that the " strictly judicial axiom " of the lawyers of the Anto- 

 nine era (" omnes homines natura aequales sunt " all men are by nature equal), after pass- 

 ing through the hands of Rousseau, and being adopted by the founders of the Constitution 



