exasperated him, but the political condition of society, the misery of the peasants, the luxury of the nobles, the despotism of the king, left him unmoved. He was singularly deficient in any conception of the value of political liberty or of free institutions. If he had lived to see the coming of the Revolution, it would have utterly astounded him. His sympathies were with an enlightened aristocracy, not with the people. In this, too, he was the man of his time, and belonged to the middle of his century, not the end of it. He saw and lamented the evils of bad government. He pointed out the miseries produced by war. He abhorred and denounced the military spirit. He called on the clergy, in the name of their religion, to join him in his righteous appeals against this great curse of mankind. "Where," he asks, "in the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, are there two in which anything is said against the scourge of war?" He rebukes the philosophers and moralists, also, for their delinquency in this matter, and replies forcibly to Montesquieu's argument that self-defense sometimes makes it necessary to begin the attack on a neighboring nation. But he does not go back to trace the evil to its root in the absence of self-government. In a letter to the King of Prussia he says, "When I asked you to become the deliverer of Greece, I did not mean to have you restore the democracy. I do not love the rule of the rabble" (_gouvernement de la canaille_). Again, writing to the same, in January, 1757, he says, "Your majesty will confer a great benefit by destroying this infamous superstition [Christianity]; I do not say among the _canaille_, who do not deserve to be enlightened, and who ought to be kept down under all yokes, but among honest people, people who think. Give white bread to the children, but only black bread to the dogs." In 1762, writing to the Marquis d'Argens, he says, "The Turks say that their Koran has sometimes the face of an angel, sometimes the face of a beast. This description suits our time. There are a few philosophers,--they have the face of an angel; all else much resembles that of a beast." Again, he says to Helvetius, "Consider no man your neighbor but the man who thinks; look on all other men as wolves, foxes, and deer." "We shall soon see," he writes to D'Alembert, "new heavens and a new earth,--I mean for honest people; for as to the _canaille_, the stupidest heaven and earth is all they are fit for." The real government of nations, according to him, should be administered by absolute kings, in the interest of freethinkers.