An unequal society always lives in fear, and with a sense of impending disaster in its heart. The effect of this atmosphere is clear enough. We have only to examine the history of France after the death of Louis XIV to realize exactly what it implies. Everyone who seeks to penetrate below the surface sees some vast calamity ahead. It may be a visitor like Chesterfield, a timid lawyer like Barbier, an ex-minister like D’Argenson, a philosopher like Voltaire. The government itself, and those with whom it is allied, has a perception that something new is abroad. They fear the novelty and they seek to suppress it, in the belief that a bold front and an adequate severity will stem the tide of critical scepticism. But neither boldness nor severity can stem that tide. The government falters for a moment on the verge of concession: there is an hour when the ministry of Turgot seemed likely to inaugurate an era of conciliation. It is too late because the price of conciliation is the sacrifice of precisely the vested interests with which the government is in partnership. So the ancient régime moves relentlessly to its destruction. It is forced to consult those whose experience it had never taken into account in the hope of salvation; and they find that, if they are to fulfil, they must also destroy. That is, other things being equal, the inevitable history of such societies. Their mental habits resemble nothing so much as the horrified timidity which persuaded Hobbes to find in despotism the only cure for social disagreement. They are afraid of reason, for this involves an examination into their own prerogative and, as at least probable, a denunciation of the title by which it is preserved. They are afraid of concession, because they see in it an admission of the weakness of their case. They magnify scepticism into sedition and they accuse even their friends who doubt the virtue of severity of betraying the allegiance which is their due. They cannot see that men will not accept the state as the appointed conscience of the nation unless they conceive themselves to possess a full share of its benefits. They minimize the sufferings of others, because they do not have experience of them, and they magnify their own virtues that they may gain confidence in themselves. They distort history, and call it patriotism; they repress the expression of grievance and call it the maintenance of law and order. In such a society, the governors appear to their subjects as dwellers in another world; and communication between them lacks the vivifying quality of fellowship. For the truth of one party is never sufficiently the truth of another for the members to talk a common language. Every vehemence becomes a threat; and by a kind of mad logic every threat is taken as an act of treason. The society is unbalanced because justice is not its habitation. Even its generosity will be resented because it has not known how to be just.