servants, for whom he was unable to make provision, to Condorcet. This charge the philosopher accepted cheerfully, and fulfilled to the end with pious scrupulosity. The affection between them had been warm and close as that of some famous pairs of antiquity; a natural attraction of character had clothed community of pursuit and interest with the grace of the highest kind of friendship. Even Condorcet's too declamatory manner only adds a certain dignity to the pathetic passage with which he closes his noble éloge on his lost friend.1 Voltaire was dead these five years, and Turgot, too, was gone. Society offered the survivor no recompense. He found the great world tiresome and frivolous, and he described its pursuits in phrases that are still faithful to the fact, as "dissipation without pleasure, vanity without meaning, and idleness without repose." It was perhaps to soften the oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that in 1786 Condorcet married."

Events were now very close at hand, in comparison with which even the most critical private transactions of Condorcet's life were pale and insignificant. In the tranquil seasons of history, when the steady currents of circumstance bear men along noiseless, the importance of the relations which we contract seems superlative; in times of storm and social wreck these petty fortunes and private chances are engulfed and lost to sight. The ferment was now rapidly rising to its intensest height, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to the burning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly ten years ago he expressed his preference for political activity over the meditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into the revolution with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixed and unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that the great ones whom he had known, the immortal Voltaire, the lofty-souled Turgot, had been rapt away by the unkind gods, before their eyes had seen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign of justice on the earth. The gods, after all, were kinder than he wot of, for they veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of '89 the spectres of '93. History would possibly miss most of its striking episodes if every actor could know the work to which he was putting his hand; and even Condorcet's faith might have wavered if he had known that between him and the fulfilment of his desires there was to be a long and, as yet, unfinished period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision which then presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime; and just as, when (1) Euvres, iii. 109, 110.

(2) His wife, said to be one of the most beautiful women of her time, was twenty-three years younger than himself, and survived until 1822. Cabanis married another sister, and Marshal Grouchy was her brother. Madame Condorcet wrote nothing of her own, except some notes to a translation which she made of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it is a consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship, so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring social dreams, the wreck of the aspiration is not total nor unrecompensed. The next best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to have sought them.

During the winter of '88 and '89, while all France was astir with elections and preparation for elections to that meeting of the StatesGeneral, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a long night of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could most serve the movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides of their duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of the subjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which his countrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery and the slave trade.1 He appealed, with a terseness and force not always characteristic of his writing, to the electors, while they were reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forget the half million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefully torn away from them, and whose need of justice was yet more urgent than their own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingenious protest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingo plantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly inconsistent it was with every idea of a free and popular Chamber that men should sit as representatives of others who had never chosen them, that they should invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the same instant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed natural rights of mankind at home.2

Of general precepts he never tired; one series of them followed another. To us some of the number may seem commonplace; but reflect that the election of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, and Condorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of political inexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because he will follow his own interest and not yours; but at the same time beware of choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, because you want ability quite as much as probity. Do not choose a man who has ever taken side against the liberty of any portion of mankind; nor one whose principles were never known until he found out that he needed your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat of soul; because what

(1) Montesquieu, and one or two other writers, had attacked slavery long before, and Condorcet published a very effective piece against it in 1781 (Réflexions sur l'Esclavage des Négres; Œuvres, vii. 63), with an epistle dedicatory to the enslaved blacks. About the same time an Abolition Society was formed in France, following the example set in England.

(2) Au Corps Electoral, contre l'Esclavage des Noirs. 3 Fév. 1789. Sur l'Admission des Députés des Planteurs de Saint Domingue. 1789, ix. 469-485.

you want is not heat but force, not violence but steadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man's actions from the accidents of his life; for one may be the enemy or the victim of a tyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by a candidate's solicitations; but, at the same time, make allowance for the existing effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decided opinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation; those who are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity for the misfortunes of the people; those who speak of justice and reason, to those who speak of political interests and of the prosperity of commerce. Distrust those who appeal to sentiment in matters that can be decided by reason; prefer light to eloquence; and pass over those who declare themselves ready to die for liberty, in favour of those who know in what liberty consists.1

In another piece he drew up a list of the rights which the nation had a claim to have recognised, such as the right to make laws, to the protection of personal liberty, to the legal administration of justice by regular judges, and to exact responsibility from the Ministers of the crown. These rights he declared it to be the first duty of the Assembly to draw up in a chart which should be the chief corner-stone of the new constitution. Then he proceeded to define the various tasks to which he conceived that the legislative body should forthwith apply itself; and among them, be it said, is no mention of any of those projects of confiscation which circumstances so speedily forced upon the Assembly when it met.2

Though many of these precepts, designed to guide the electors in their choice of men, are sagacious and admirable, they smack strongly of that absolute and abstract spirit which can never become powerful in politics without danger. It is certain that in the spring of '89, Condorcet held hereditary monarchy to be most suitable to "the wealth, the population, the extent of France, and to the political system of Europe." Yet the reasons which he gives for thinking this are not very cogent, and he can hardly have felt them to be so; moreover, he would hardly have made any remark on the subject if he had not been conscious of the hazard there was. It is significant, however, of the little distance which all the most uncompromising and most thoughtful revolutionists saw in front of them, that even Condorcet should, so late as the eve of the assembly of the States-General, have talked about attachment to the forms of monarchy and respect for the royal person and prerogative; and should have represented the notion of

(1) Lettres d'un Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat, ix. 255–259.

(2) Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux, ix. 263–283.

(3) ix. 266.

1

the property of the Church undergoing any confiscation as an invention of the enemies of freedom. Before the year was out, the property of the Church had undergone confiscation; before two years had gone he was an ardent Republican; and in rather over a year more he had voted the king guilty.

It is worth while to cite here a still more pointed example of the want of prevision so common and so intelligible at that time. Writing in July, 1791, he confutes those who asserted that an established and limited monarchy was a safeguard against a usurper, whose power is only limited by his own audacity and address, by pointing out that the extent of France, its divisions into departments, the separation between the various branches of the administration, the freedom of the press, the multitude of the public points, were all so many insurmountable barriers against a French Cromwell. "To anybody who has read with attention the history of the usurpation of Cromwell, it is clear that a single newspaper would have been enough to stop his success; it is clear that if the people of England had known how to read other books beside their Bible, the hypocritical Pretender, unmasked from his first step, would soon have ceased to be dangerous." Again, is the nation to be cajoled by some ambitious general, gratifying its desire to be an empire-race? "Is this what is asked by true friends of liberty, those who only seek that reason and right should have empire over men? What provinces, conquered by a French general, will he despoil to buy our suffrages? Will he promise our soldiers, as the consuls promised the citizens of Rome, the pillage of Spain or of Syria? No, assuredly; it is because we cannot be an empire-nation (peuple-roi), that we shall remain a free nation."2 How many years were there between this conclusive reasoning, and the pillage of Italy to please the Parisians, the expedition to Egypt, the seizure of Spain?

Condorcet was not a member of the Assembly in whose formation and composition he had taken so vivid and practical an interest. The first political functions which he was invited to undertake were those of a member of the municipality of Paris. In the tremendous drama of which the scenes were now opening, the Town-hall of Paris was to prove itself far more truly the centre of movement and action than the Constituent Assembly. The efforts of the Constituent Assembly to build up were tardy and ineffectual. The activity of the municipality of Paris in pulling down was, after a time, ceaseless, and it was eminently successful. The first mayor was the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet's defeated competitor at the Academy. With fall of Bastille, summary hangings at the nearest lantern-post, October insurrection of women, and triumphant compulsion of king, queen, and Assembly to Paris from Versailles, with heads accompany(1) ix. 264. (2) xii. 229-3, and 234.

ing on pikes, the two rivals, now colleagues, must have felt that the contests for them were, indeed, no longer academic. The astronomy of the one and the geometry of the other were for ever done with; and Condorcet's longing for active political life in preference to mere study was to be liberally gratified.

Unhappily or not, the movement was beyond the control of anybody who, like Condorcet, had no force beyond that of disciplined reason and principle. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in with oceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention and irrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments were loyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises of this overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell, and mere good-will does not tell. Exaltation reaches a pitch at which the physical sensibilities are so quickened as to be supreme over the rest of the nature; and in these moods it is the man gifted with the physical quality, as mysterious and indescribable as it is resistless, of a Marat, to take a bad example, or a Danton, to take a good one, who can ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.' Of this quality Condorcet had nothing. His personal presence inspired a decent respect, but no strong emotion either of fear or admiration or physical sympathy. His voice was feeble, his utterance indistinct; and he never got over that nervous apprehension which the spectacle of large and turbulent crowds naturally rouses in the student. In a revolution after the manner of Lord Somers, he would have been invaluable. He thoroughly understood his own principles, and he was a master of the art, so useful in its place and time and so respectable in all places and times, of considering political projects point by point with reference to a definite framework of rational ideas. But this was no time for such an art; this was not a revolution to be guided by reason, even reason, like Condorcet's, streaked with Jacobinical fibre. The national ideas in which it had arisen had transformed themselves into tumultuous passion, and from this into frenzied action.

Every politician of real eminence as a reformer possesses one of three elements. One class of men is inspired by an intellectual attachment to certain ideas of justice and right reason: another is moved by a deep pity for the hard lot of the mass of every society: while the third, such men as Richelieu, for example, have an instinctive appreciation and passion for good, wise, and orderly government. The great and typical ruler is moved in varying degrees by all three in modern times, when the claims of the poor, the rank and file of the social army, have been raised to the permanent place that belongs to them. Each of the three types has its own peculiar conditions of success, and there are circumstances in which some one of the three is more able to grapple with the obstacles to order than either of the other two. It soon became very