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expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts is most likely far greater); no more is it a question of a fool who is afraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rash judgment."

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This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not among Condorcet's gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of immoderation, alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured the motives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christian was one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh; and anybody who declined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavish scrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller to whom the especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, at every step it takes, it inflicts on Moses. Well, this temper is not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance with rich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we are particularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatient humour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolent reluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers have been so conscientious as he was in the labour he bestowed upon subjects which he held to be worthy of deliberate scrutiny and consideration. His defect was in finding too few of such subjects, in having too many foregone conclusions. Turgot and Montesquieu are perhaps the only two eminent men in France during this part of the century of whom the same defect might not be alleged. Again, Condorcet's impatience of underlying temperament did not prevent him from filling his compositions with solid, sober, and profound reflections, the products of grave and sustained meditation upon an experience, much of which must have been severely trying and repugnant to one of his constitution. While recognising this trait, then, let us not over-state

either it or its consequences.

It is now becoming easier through the distance to discern what were the main currents of opinion and circumstance in France when Condorcet came to take his place among her workers. The third quarter of the century was just closing. Louis XV. died in 1774; and though his death was of little intrinsic consequence, except as the removal of every foul and corrupt heart is of consequence, it is justly taken to mark the date of the beginning of the French Revolution. It was the accidental shifting of position which served to disclose that the existing system was smitten with a mortal paralysis. It is often said that what destroyed the French kingdom was despotism. A sounder explanation discovers the causes less in despotism than in anarchy-anarchy in every department where it could be most ruinous. We look in vain for a single firm or sound

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spot in the whole field of government which a wise ruler could have made the centre of renovating processes. Whatever was done in the direction of reform seemed, like the new patch in the old garment, only to make wider the rents and divisions that distracted the country. No substantial reconstruction was possible, because all the evils came from the sinister interests of the nobles, the clergy, or the financiers; and these classes, informally bound together against the common weal, were too strong for either the sovereign or the ablest minister to thrust them aside. The material condition of France was one of supreme embarrassment and disorder, only curable by remedies which the political and social condition of the country made it impossible to employ.

This would explain why a change of some sort was inevitable. But why was the change which actually took place in that direction rather than another? Why did France not sink under her economical disorders, as greater empires than France had done? Why, instead of sinking and falling asunder, did the French people advance with a singleness of impulse unknown in their history before to their own deliverance; overthrow the system that was crushing them, and purge themselves with fire and sword of those who administered and maintained it, defying the hopes of the nation; and then successfully encounter the giant's task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, and reconstructing the fabric of their own society with the other? The answer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition of France. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenth century, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation of Catholicism and Feudalism, and apparently nothing but corruption remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what inspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possible new, was the spiritual preparation that had been in swift progress since the third decade of the century. The forms and methods of this preparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath its influence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and the schools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots, all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief in human reason, with the idea of the natural rights of man, and impregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is true that we find Voltaire complaining, towards the close of his days, of the century being satiated and weary—un siècle dégouté— not knowing well what it wanted. "The public," he said, "has been eighty years at table, and now it drinks bad brandy at the end of the

meal."

In literature and art this was true; going deeper down than these, the public was eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and more fruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keen appetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, they had now risen up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after social righteousness. This was the noble faith which saved France; by this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionately-held conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. Such a destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously confined in the hands of castes and State churches, which systematically and of their very constitution bury justice under the sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition.

two sources.

Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from He was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to the Church, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaire flourished and taught, the destructive movement only reached theology, and Voltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the original impulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economical writers and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look upon societies with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence of institutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible of modification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural, therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movement which set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of Louis XV. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire; he was hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot; and he was urgent, heated, impetuous, with a ponderous vehemence all his own. In a word, he was the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spirit existed in geometers and Encyclopædists; at once too reasonable and too little reasonable, too precise and scientific and too vague, too rigorously logical on the one hand, and too abundantly passionate on the other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the deductive method worked by passion. Such machinery with such motive force is of ruinous potency when applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society.

Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and therefore he hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific knowledge, he said, which explains why the efforts after liberty in the unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by (1) Letter to Condorcet (1774). Œuvres, i. 35.

bloodshed and massacre :- -"Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France; observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two revolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened; we see on the one side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that they are fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country with blood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell; on the other, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacific wisdom the freest constitution in the world." It is not wonderful that his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved English Whigs, but hated English Republicans; who could forgive an aristocratic faction grasping power for their order, but not a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smite in the name of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power with a noble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in the heart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never known since, because this ruler knew nothing about principes or the Rights of Man. However, Nemesis comes; for, by-and-by, Condorcet found himself writing a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior in lawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August.2

II.

The course of events after 1774 is, in its larger features, well known to every reader. Turgot, after a month of office at the Admiralty, was in August made Controller-General of Finance. With his accession to power, the reforming ideas of the century became practical. He nominated Condorcet to be Inspector of Coinage, an offer which Condorcet deprecated in these words, "It is said of you in certain quarters that money costs you nothing when there is any question of obliging your friends. I should be bitterly ashamed of giving any semblance of foundation to these absurd speeches. I pray you, do nothing for me just now. Though not rich, I am not pressed for money. Entrust to me some important task-the reduction of measures for instance; then wait till my labours have really earned some reward." In this high-minded spirit he undertook, along with two other eminent men of science, the task of examining certain projects for canals which engaged the attention of the Minister. "People will tell you," he wrote, " that I have got an office worth two hundred and forty pounds. All lies! We undertook it out of friendship for M. Turgot; but we refused the salaries which were offered." We may profitably contrast this

(1) Eloge de Franklin, iii. 422.

(2) Réflexions sur la Rév. de 1688, et sur celle du 10 Août, xii. 197.
(3) i. lxxiii.

(4) i. lxxiii.-iv.

devotion to the public interest with the rapacity of the clergy and nobles, who drove Turgot from office because he talked of taxing them like their neighbours, and declined to glut their insatiable craving for place and plunder.

Turgot was dismissed (May, 1776), and presently Necker was installed in his place. Condorcet had defended with much vigour and a little asperity the policy of free internal trade in corn against Necker, who was for the maintenance of the restrictions of commercial intercourse between the different provinces of the kingdom. Consequently, when the new Minister came into office, Condorcet wrote to Maurepas, resigning his post. "I have," he said, "pronounced too decidedly what I think about both M. Necker and his works to be able to keep any place that depends upon him." This was not the first taste that Maurepas had had of Condorcet's resolute self-respect. The Duke de la Vrillière, one of the most scandalous persons of the century, was an honorary member of the Academy, and he was the brother-in-law of Maurepas. It was expected from the perpetual secretary that he should compose a eulogy upon the occasion of his death, and Condorcet was warned by friends, who seldom reflect that a man above the common quality owes something more to himself than mere prudence, not to irritate the powerful Minister by a slight upon his relation. He was inflexible. "Would you rather have me persecuted," he asked, " for a wrong than for something just and moral? Think, too, that they will pardon my silence much more readily than they would my words, for my mind is fixed not to betray the truth.""

In 1782 Condorcet was elected into the Academy. His competitor was Bailly, over whom he had a majority of one; the true contest, however, lying less between the two candidates than between D'Alembert and Buffon, who on this occasion were said to have fought one of the greatest battles in the not peaceful history of the Academy. Such mighty anger burns even in celestial minds. D'Alembert is said to have exclaimed, we may hope with some exaggeration, that he was better pleased at winning that victory than he would have been to find out the squaring of the circle.3 Destiny, which had so pitiful a doom in store for the two candidates of that day, soon closed D'Alembert's share in these struggles of the learned and in all others. He died in the following year, and by his last act testified to his trust in the generous character of Condorcet; for having by the benevolence of a life-time left himself on his death-bed without resources, he confided two old and faithful

(1) Euvres, i. 296.

(2) i. lviii.

(3) i. lxxxix. Condorcet had 16 votes, and Bailly 15. "Jamais aucune élection," says La Harpe, who was all for Buffon, and detested philosophes, "n'avait offert ni ce nombre ni ce partage."-Philos. du 18ième Siècle, i. 77.

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