been, says its author, one first error of all legislators, namely, 'that which maintains that the vices and passions of human nature render the social state impossible without co-ercive laws.' He would abolish all such laws; and never more seek to protect the right against usurpation', or 'property against violence'. The world should be governed on far better, on far more humane, principles. 'Men', says he, 'exempt from the fears of indigence, would have only a sole object of their hopes, a sole motive of their actions, the common good. Only banish property, and substitute an equality of riches' for that 'grand scourge' of the human race, and all selfishness, all vice, all crime, and all evil, will disappear from the world, and the universe put on a new face!

We might fill a volume with such short and easy methods for the regeneration of mankind. But we must forbear. When we consider the learning, the ability, and the genius, of the men, by whom such schemes are set before us, we are lost in wonder and amazement. If they were produced, like the Republic of Plato, merely as abstract visions of justice', we should still wonder at such aberrations of the human mind. But they are actually and earnestly recommended, by their authors, as schemes for the practical adoption of mankind. What, then, shall we think of them? Shall we not suspect, indeed, that our own reason labors under some strange hallucination, rather than that such men are as insane as they appear to us? This would, perhaps, be the proper inference, if these philosophers, as they are called, had not arraigned all past ages on the charge of downright stupidity and folly. The age, which despises the past, has no claim to the respect of the future.

We have not, as yet, contemplated the dark abyss of the great Error of the Eighteenth Century. We have merely caught a glimpse of its philosophy, and a few of its wonderful Utopias. The practical workings of its philanthropy remains to be considered. The bitter invectives, which those lovers of despotism, launched at every species and variety of inequality, as well as other appeals to the malignant passions of mankind, we have, thus far, passed over in silence. Of all the passions of the Revolution of 1789, 'the deepest and the most solidly rooted', says

De Tocqueville, 'was a violent and unquenchable hatred of inequality.' Hence it was that Raynal, the prophet of this new religion of hate, exclaimed: 'When will the angel of Extermination come to beat down all that elevates itself, and reduce all to one level.' The prayer of Raynal, or rather his diabolical imprecation, which was that of France herself, was soon answered. The angel of Extermination appeared in the year 1789. That Revolution was, perhaps, the most magnificent illusion by which the world has ever been deceived. The friends of freedom, as they are called, hailed that tremendous explosion of hate as the sublime outburst of philanthropy and good will to man. With acclamations of joy and delight, wild and enthusiastic, they hailed the angel of Extermination as the angel of deliverance, and mercy, and life. For they beheld, as they imagined, a great nation rising in its might, with the resistless determination to shake off the accumulated wrongs and abuses of the past, and establish, in their stead, the everlasting principles of right. The glory of the cause, or rather the glory of the illusion, cast a deceptive lustre over the spirit of the age and nation. France desired equality; she knew nothing of liberty. She had, indeed, neither learned the first lesson, nor inhaled the first breath, of a rational freedom. She had sworn eternal hostility to tyrants, not eternal fidelity to man. Her prophets, her teachers, her guides, were inspired by hate, and not by love. It was the heat from below, and not the light from above, which had set them in motion, and wrapped them in flames. Their ruling passion was, indeed, a wild, dark, fierce, maddened spirit of resentment, directed against 'all that elevates itself', or rises above the common level; and was neither enlightened by wisdom, nor controlled by goodness. Hence it was as impotent to construct as it was mighty to destroy. The very work of death itself was their grim delight and chiefest joy. The Christian prayer, which invokes the angel of Mercy to elevate all that debases itself, was then unknown to France.

The infidel philosopher was at the helm. As he had introduced, so he undertook to conduct, the Revolution. Believing, as he did, in the inherent purity and the indefinite perfectibility of man,' he imagined that all the evils around him were exclu

sively due to the institutions of society. Hence, to demolish these, and substitute others in their place, would be, as he fondly imagined, to restore the people to their 'inherent rectitude,' and set them forward in a glorious career of 'indefinite perfectibility.' Accordingly, the heads of his rulers are taken off; the new regime is introduced; and he looks for the great day of emancipation to dawn. But instead of this, the reign of terror sets in, with night, and death, and hell, and the guillotine, in its train.

We shall not attempt to describe the scenes which followed. If we had the genius of a Dante, we might produce a counterpart to the Inferno, in which guilty men, transformed to demons, are the torturers of guilty men. Or, if we had the grand pictorial imagination of a Chaucer, we might build some great house of death close by the gates of hell, and fill it with images of horror from the infernal regions of the French Revolution. A mob of women, frantic with despair and wild with vengeance, crying for bread; and mothers, with uplifted knives, releasing their children from the world as regenerated by the philosophers, should be sculptured on its walls, or emblazoned on its tablatures. And a philanthropist, plying the guillotine, with eyes gleaming and gloating over the work, while his tongue, ever and anon, laps the blood flowing at his feet, should likewise be conspicuous among its imagery. Nay, if we had the taste and talent for such things, every niche, every nook, every panel, and every corner, of the building, should have its memento of that great carnival of death and depravity. But as it is, we shall simply let the curtain drop, and hide from view that Inferno of philosophers and reformers; leaving all their victims behind the scenes to lift up their eyes, as it were, in hell, being in torments, and cursing the very day and hour when first they dreamed of the inherent purity of man'.

That dream of madness, so fatal then, was not confined to France alone. It was also dreamed in America. We have said that M. Turgot was the Madison of France. On the other hand, Madi'the father of the Constitution,' was the Turgot of America. Hence, without wishing it, without knowing it', he 'contributed to the Revolution' of 1861. As Turgot, by his doctrines and his measures, was the forerunner of the angel of Extermination,

which visited France in 1789; so Madison, the great legislator of 1787, prepared the way for the angel of Extermination, which, in 1861, visited the South. But the demonstration of this truth must be reserved for some future number of THE SOUTHERN REVIEW.1

More than once, in the course of the preceding reflections, have the eloquent words of a great writer occurred to our minds; covering the whole ground we have so feebly occupied, and far more. The words in question being, in fact, as pertinent to the present discussion as they are eloquent, we shall here introduce them. 'All the speculations and schemes of the sanguine projectors of all ages', says John Foster, 'have left the world still a prey to infinite legions of vices and miseries; an immortal band, which has trampled in scorn on the monuments and dust of self-idolizing men who dreamed, each in his day, that they were born to chase these evils out of the earth. If these vain demi-gods of an hour, who trusted to change the world, and who perhaps wished to change it only to make it a temple to their fame, could be awakened from the unmarked graves into which they sunk, to look a little around the world for some traces of the success of their projects, would they not be eager to retire again into the chamber of death, to hide the shame of their remembered presumption? Hitherto the fatal cause of these evils, the corruption of the human heart, has sported with the weakness, or seduced the strength, of all human contrivances to subdue them. Nor do I perceive any signs, as yet, that we are commencing a better era, in which the means that have failed before, or the expedients of some new and happy invention, shall become irresistible, like the sword of Michael, in our hands. The nature of man, "Still cast ominous conjecture on the whole success." While that is corrupt, it will pervert the very schemes and operations by which the world should be improved, though their first principles be as pure as heaven; and revolutions, great discoveries, augmented science, and new forms of polity, will become in effect what may be called the sublime mechanics of depravity.'

The intelligent reader will, of course, bear it in mind, that Turgot and Madison are selected as the subjects of our remarks, because they were 'representative men', and because they were among the most influential of those by whom the great Error of the Eighteenth Century was embraced and reduced to practice, or embodied in institutions.

There is, it must be admitted, one difference between the French Revolution of 1789 and the American Revolution of 1861. The one was instigated by infidel philosophers; the other, by professedly religious preachers. This difference is, however, more nominal than real. For the preachers, having adopted the political maxims of the philosophers, were animated by the same spirit of revolt against the eternal laws of heaven and earth. In open defiance of their own creeds, as well as in proud contempt of the principles of the Bible, with respect to the nature of man, they embraced the anarchic maxims of the infidel philosophers of the eighteenth century, and proceeded to set the New World on fire. Hence both Revolutions had their roots in the same great error, were nourished by the same fell spirit, and brought forth the same fruits of desolation and death. It was precisely the same virus which convulsed and devoured France in 1789 and America in 1861. It was not as Christian divines, but as infidel dreamers and reformers, that the Beechers, the Tyngs, the Cheevers, and the McIlvaines, of the North, trod in the fatal footsteps of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, and the Raynals, of France. Heaven have mercy on their poor deluded souls! But we shall not spare their errors. On the contrary, we shall, in some future number of this REVIEW, expose the radical opposition to their political maxims to the principles and the spirit of the religion which they profess, and upon which they have, by their worse than infidel practice, brought such infinite and ineffacable disgrace.

ART. II.-1. Répertoire d'Optique Moderne. Par l'Abbé Moigno. Paris: A. Franck. 1847.

2. Euvres de François Arago. Publiées d'après son ordre sous la direction de M. J. A. Barral. Paris: Gide, éditeur. 1858.