We are not to suppose that the Encyclopaedia was the originating organ of either new methods or new social ideas. The exalted and peculiarly modern views about peace, for instance, were plainly inspired from the writings of the Abbe Saint Pierre (1658-1743)--one of the most original spirits of the century, who deserves to be remembered among other good services as the inventor of the word _bienfaisance_. Again, in the mass of the political articles we feel the immense impulse that was given to sociological discussion by the Esprit des Lois. Few questions are debated here, which Montesquieu had not raised, and none are debated without reference to Montesquieu's line of argument. The change of which we are conscious in turning from the Esprit des Lois to the Encyclopaedia is that political ideas have been grasped as instruments. Philosophy has become patriotism. The Encyclopaedists advanced with grave solicitude to the consideration of evils, to which the red-heeled parasites of Versailles were insolently and incorrigibly blind. The articles on Agriculture, for example, are admirable alike for the fulness and precision with which they expose the actual state of France; for the clearness with which they trace its deplorable inadequateness back to the true sources; and for the strong interest and sympathy in the subject, which they both exhibit and inspire. If now and again the touch is too idyllic, it was still a prodigious gain to let the country know in a definite way that of the fifty million arpents of cultivable land in the realm, more than one quarter lay either unbroken or abandoned. And it was a prodigious gain to arouse the attention of the general public to the causes of the forced deterioration of French agriculture, namely, the restrictions on trade in grain, the arbitrariness of the imposts, and the flight of the population to the large towns. Then the demonstration, corroborated in the pages of the Encyclopaedia by the two patriotic vaunts of contemporary English writers, of the stimulus given to agriculture by our system of free exports, contained one of the most useful lessons that the French had to learn.