Contemporaneous with this sudden apparition of new fields of scientific discovery and enlargement of the old was an intellectual movement of a more general character than that necessarily involved in the progress of natural philosophy. The French Encyclopædists took hold of social, moral and juridical questions with an unsparing vigor that could not be gainsaid. The art of criticism was simultaneously introduced, perfected and applied. Many of the wrongs and follies that paralyzed thought and industry were dragged to light. Hoary absurdities that smothered law and gospel under the foul mass of privilege and superstition, and made them a curse instead of a blessing, shrank before the storm of ridicule and denunciation. Those which did not at once succumb were placed in a position of publicity and exposure in which they could not long survive. The great upheaval of which the French Revolution was a part was thus originated. Sounder political ideas were brought within reach of the masses, till then not recipient, it may almost be said, of any political ideas at all. Statesmen and governments were similarly enlightened, Adam Smith's declaration of commercial antedated by two years Mr. Jefferson's of political independence. The atrocities of the English criminal code, approaching those of Draco, were put in process of correction, though, as usual in British reforms, it took half a century to effect their complete removal; a woman having been, if we recollect rightly, hanged for a trifling theft in the last years of George IV. This same slowness of that conservative but persevering people is calculated to blind us to the operation among them of deep-seated and active influences. Hardly till 1815 can we discover in England any fervor, much less efficiency, in the demand for an extension of popular rights and relaxation of the grasp of privilege. Irish manufactures continued to be distinctly and rigidly repelled from competition with English by formal statute; Jewish and Catholic disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld; counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases; chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there can be no doubt that life and property were better protected by law in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain. Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years before. A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one. It shared fully in the intellectual impulse of the day. Victorious in all its latest struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might naturally have been expected to enter at once on a career of improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors. It is not