past generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when general education enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and by women as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as the most formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denser population would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposed intensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankind in self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with the amendment of human institutions. Passion can be dominated by reflection, and by the deliberate encouragement of gentle and altruistic sentiments. The business of politics is to destroy the opposition between self-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a man seeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. A great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of the inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France while Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been ruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a perpetual confederation of mankind. It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faith in the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy, and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvétius and Holbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which made for itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking of men than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn to choose of two alternative views the one which would favour this sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion," for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political institutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is institutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and destruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, the unchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvétius) that human nature is itself the product of "education" or, as we should call it, "environment." Circumstances and above all political institutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, are gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutions and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of prejudice and despotism.