It is true, such is the aspect under which skepticism makes us consider society and human justice, driving us through despair to revolt and disorder, and bringing us back through despair again to quite another yoke than that of reason and virtue, to that regulated disorder which is called despotism. The spectacle of human things, viewed coolly, and without the spirit of system, is, thank God, less sombre. Without doubt, society and human justice have still many imperfections which time discovers and corrects; but it may be said, that in general they rest on truth and natural equity. The proof of it is, that society everywhere subsists, and is even developed. Moreover, facts, were they such as the melancholy pen of a Pascal or a Rousseau represent them to be, facts are not all,--before facts is right; and this idea of right alone, if it is real, suffices to overturn an abasing system, and save human dignity. Now, is the idea of right a chimera? I again appeal to languages, to individual consciousness, to the human race,--is it not true that fact is everywhere distinguished from right, fact which too often, perhaps, but not always, as it is said, is opposed to right; and right that subdues and rules fact, or protests against it? What word is it that restrains most in human societies? Is it not that of right? Look for a language that does not contain it. On all sides, society is bristling with rights. There is even a distinction made between natural right and positive right, between what is legal and what is equitable. It is proclaimed that force should be in the service of right, and not right at the mercy of force. The triumphs of force, wherever we perceive them, either under our eyes, or by the aid of history in bygone centuries, or by favor of universal publicity beyond the ocean, and in foreign continents, rouse indignation in the disinterested spectator or reader. On the contrary, he who inscribes on his banner the name of right, by that alone interests us; the cause of right, or what we suppose to be the cause of right, is for us the cause of humanity. It is also a fact, and an incontestable fact, that in the eyes of man fact is not every thing, and that the idea of right is a universal idea, graven in shining and ineffaceable characters, if not in the visible world, at least in that of thought and the soul; concerning that is the question; it is also that which in the long run reforms and governs the other. Individual consciousness, conceived and transferred to the entire species, is called common sense. It is common sense that has made, that sustains, that develops languages, natural and permanent beliefs, society and its fundamental institutions. Grammarians have not invented languages, nor legislators societies, nor philosophers general beliefs. All these things have not been personally done, but by the whole world,--by the genius of humanity.