"We have calumniated the

with their religion of letters.' Chinese', says he, 'merely because their metaphysic is not ours. We should have admired in them two merits, which condemn the superstitions of the Pagans, and the morals of the Christians. Never was their religion of letters dishonored by fables, nor stained by quarrels and civil wars.' No writer on the philosophy of history has, so far as we know, even attempted to illustrate, from the annals of China, the great lessons they seem so well adapted to impress on the human mind. But it is certainly better to remain silent with Vico, and Hegel, and other writers, than to utter the sheer nonsense of Voltaire. We thank him for his nonsense, however, since it serves to illustrate and enforce the great truth, that no man, however great his learning or his genius, who ignores the real internal causes which debase and desolate the world, can either comprehend the conditions of human progress, or the circumstances on which civil liberty depends. Voltaire, it is certain, knew nothing of such liberty, either in itself, or in its causes and conditions. He merely sought equality; and he sought it, too, in the bosom of a despicable Chinese despotism. No matter though all be slaves, provided that all, except one, are equal.

Voltaire, in reality, hated liberty as much as he admired equality. Hence when, in 1771, the king swept away the Parliament, Voltaire applauded. The king is right,' said he, 'if one must serve, I hold it better to serve a well-bred lion, who is naturally stronger than I am, than two hundred rats of my own breed'. We should, indeed, have most profoundly sympathized with Voltaire in the above sentiment, if the rats, which he so intensely abhorred, had only been radicals. But they were not radicals; and besides, Louis XV., that vile epitome of meanness, was Voltaire's lion! Even his will may be the law, provided all are equal under the shadow of his despotic meanness. This arch-advocate of civil despotism has, no doubt, been regarded as the ardent friend of liberty, by superficial thinkers, only because he hated inequality.

In this respect, Voltaire represented the French people of his time; and this explains the apparent anomaly, that after a crusade against inequality, supposed to be a crusade in favor of

liberty, the nation so quietly settled down under the absolute despotism of one man, and rejoiced in their equality. There is, indeed, but one step between the hatred of inequality and the love of despotism. It was, then, no very wonderful change, when the French people took that step.

It is the great fundamental doctrine of Rousseau, that man is naturally and positively good, and that, in all former ages, he has been depraved by society and civilization.' Little faith had he in the efficacy of knowledge. Indeed, from all he had seen of the Voltaires, the Diderots, the Grimms, the D'Albachs, the Raynals, and the other philosophers, he concluded that philosophy and letters corrupt the human heart. He should have only concluded, that something more than philosophy and letters, is necessary to keep it from becoming corrupt. Hence his method, for the regeneration of the world, is different from that of the other philosophers. A disciple of Plato, in the eighteenth century, he found the great source of social evils in the institution of property; and, accordingly, he preached a crusade against the accursed words mine and thine. The savage', said he, nature, and the friend

'when he has dined, is at peace with all of all his kind.' See to it, then, that all the savages of earth, and especially all the civilized savages, are well fed, if you would have a glorious and a perpetual peace. See to it, moreover, that they are fed from the public crib, and that no man be allowed to call any thing his own; since, according to the axiom of the sage Locke, there will be no injury when there is no property.'

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The celebrated Code of Nature, which played so terrible a part in the French Revolution, is built on this platform of Rousseau. 'This Code, like the Republic of Plato, inculcates, in the eighteenth century, the doctrine of a community of goods, or an equality of riches, substituted for the grand scourge of property.' 'Nothing', says the first article of that Code, 'belongs wholly to any one. Property is detestable, and any one who attempts to re-establish it shall be imprisoned for life, as a dangerous madman, and an enemy to the human race.' There has

2 There is no such axiom in Locke. Rousseau derived it from his master, Plato. 3 Laharpe, in Cours de Litterature, vol. xviii., gives an elaborate criticism on this Code, under the false impression that it was the work of Diderot. It was, in fact, written by Morelly.

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

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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, Madison, 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,