all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief in human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. They 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 a little bad cognac at the end of its meal.'[10] In literature and art this was true; going deeper 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, men had now risen up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after social righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, by this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionate conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. That destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously confined in the hands of castes and official churches, which systematically and of their very constitution bury justice under the sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition. Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from two sources. 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, 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 Lewis 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 heavy 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. When applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is of ruinous potency.