modified by all that we include in the agencies of society, would be the most deadly and degrading condition of life that we are able to conceive. But in spite of this intelligible confusion, they applied the conception of Justice, which they fancied they had borrowed from Nature-the cruellest and least righteous of all the immortals-to the organization and discipline of the State; and hence its influence spread over the whole field of social life. The noble and elevating sense of public duty, the consciousness of deep moral obligation, of which Justice is the highest expression, almost forgotten as it had been, even in its narrowest form, amid the corruptions of Catholicism and the doctrinal disputatiousness of Protestantism, won a new, wider, and more enduring empire over the European mind.

Connected with this, and yet above this, sprang up the greatest of all the positive and constructive forces of the Revolution-the generous and sublime sentiment of the brotherhood of men. This was no new truth. It was at all events as old as Christianity, where it had begotten the sweet and holy precept of charity. But charity and brotherhood had fled from a Church that had invited the secular arm to dragonnades, not more nor less than from the Church which

had drawn up and was administering the Penal Laws in Ireland. Paradoxical as it may sound, the tradition of love and charity which had been driven away from political Churches, found capacious shelter first in the profoundly humane spirit of Voltaire. The articles on Slavery, Punishments, and Persecutions in the Philosophical Dictionary are what the voice of the Church should have been, and had been, but was no more. It was Rousseau, however, who, filled with an ardent love for mankind, developed to the full the expansive forces of this divine sentiment, and proclaimed its sovereignty with a noble and touching eloquence that went straight to the heart of his generation.

The promulgation once more of this truth, not in a hortatory manner by theological doctors, but as the universal and heartfelt conviction of a nation, was the most splendid achievement of the Revolution, defaced as it was too soon afterwards by the extravagances of a panic for which the retrograde powers of Europe must be accounted mainly responsible. The sentiment of brotherhood was more than moral in France at this epoch. It was a religion, perhaps the highest, supported or not by a theistic apparatus, to which the human mind is capable of rising. The material misery and degradation of France in the eighteenth century kindled

spiritual light in her, which fifty years of material prosperity and moral depravation have not altogether extinguished. Her own sufferings inspired an eager sympathy for all the rest of the family of men, and a high-minded zeal that they also should partake of the gifts which had been won by her efforts and sacrifice. The manner of all this has seemed to those of slower imagination to be theatrical: seen with more sympathetic eyes, it is bright with the glow of religion and humanity.

Consciously or unconsciously, the men of the generation immediately after '89 derived warmth and inspiration from this fervid outburst, and as a consequence of this special characteristic of it. Even those who opposed the Revolution caught a measure of brightness and largeness from their adversary. Followed as it was by reaction, yet the reactionists were reactionists of the highest pitch. De Maistre in philosophy, and Chateaubriand in religion, irresistibly penetrated with the positive elements of the very movement which they detested, were of a strangely different size and type from any predecessors they had in other times of reaction. The influence of Rousseau seems plainly perceptible in every page of the Génie du Christianisme. The difference in temper, and, we

may add, in practical influence, between this renownedbook and the controversial defences and apologies which teemed forth from the English press during the eighteenth century, is the measure of the enlargement of mind and sentiment that had taken place in the interval. Far inferior in intellectual weight and acuteness, and without erudition, yet it is marked by a fineness of sympathy, and a strong sense of the spiritual interest of all sorts and conditions of men, which had been entirely absent from religious literature since the beginning of the century. Christianity emerges once more as something else than a scheme to be proved or to be disproved. The writings of De Maistre, again, cannot be called reactionary in the sense of advocating a return to medievalism, as the Middle Age had been understood. His ideas and standards of the superiority of the social organization of this period over the ancient organizations to which the Revolutionists ignorantly dreamt of returning, are distinctly coloured by that conception of progress which it is one of the glories of his enemies to have permanently established. He demonstrated the inadequacy of the Revolution, but in a spirit which has itself plenty of critical and revolutionary marks.

Partly, we may find a reason for this mental expan

sion in the colossal and unparalleled size of the ruins. which the French Revolution made in the public system of Europe, and which gave something of sublime even to the horror of the beholders. But another and deeper reason is discovered in the breadth of the positive contributions that had been made to the cause of progress, which is at bottom identical with that cause of order which the best reactionists had at heart -the conception of politics as a special and very exalted branch of morals; the constant presence and supremacy of justice as a condition of social welfare; and the ennobling consciousness of a universal responsibility and obligation among nations for common aid and succour, of the duty incumbent upon each of sharing the beneficent products of its own endeavour with all.

The red and lurid fascination of the guillotine still blinds men to the intrepid enthusiasm exhibited alike by the leaders and the people, both in '89 and in the ever vilified '93. Let us notice two points. First, their absolute unfamiliarity with public life, with the necessity therefore of temporising, of compromise, of aiming not too high, of conciliating masses of opposing interest, made them the more effective organs for an enthusiasm entirely unconnected with, where it was