condition good, because equal. It was the State, culture, society, that first introduced inequality, and vice and crime thereby. The existing order was not merely incompetent, as the Encyclopædists asserted, but hurtful, poisonous, deadly. And, in contrast to it, he sketches a picture of the true human State. Equal and good men assemble in their natural condition to think on the basis of their future State. Each endows the new community with all liberty and property, in order to receive back an equal share of the management and the possessions of the whole. But this whole is omnipotent. No laws bind its will, for its will is the source of all law. No king, no official, no superior rules over it; each individual is only empowered to act, so far and so long as he upholds the plenipotence of the sovereign mass. It is not the upper classes who command the people, but the people which require obedience from its officers and throws them away when they no longer please it. For individual liberty there is here no place; but owing to the equality of all, the free will of the masses joyously and harmoniously prevails. For a season these doctrines only served to afford a welcome mental stimulant to the minds, if not of the nobility, of the cultivated and property-possessing classes. The higher, and soon the lower, bourgeoisie inflated themselves with these views. At this period they shared certain of the privileges of the nobles, filled numerous and prominent offices in the State, gave to the nation its largest number of famous thinkers and poets, promoted industry and commerce, and daily increased in wealth, while the nobles, by their extravagance, ruined themselves financially. The former were, therefore, full of the consciousness of their own dignity, and found the continued precedence claimed by the nobles to be unendurable. They believed with inward satisfaction in this doctrine of the equality of all men and the sovereignty of the whole. For, instead of the privileged, it seemed to them self-evident that owing to their culture they, the hitherto unprivileged, ought to stand out prominently among the people as leaders of that governing whole. Thus the state of freedom and equality would be the state of pure reason as well, and, therefore, the leading position could not fail to fall to them, the masters of reasonable discussion. Meanwhile the mass of the poor, wholly cut off from the sources of culture and the mental movements of their country, for long years knew nothing of this absolute governing power which, according to the new discoveries, inalienably belonged to it, and was so surprisingly soon to fall into its lap. The only change in their condition, and thus the only preparation for their future sovereignty, was an increase of outward distress and of inward confusion and embitterment; and then came the time when the small circle to which education and enjoyment were limited, and the State power they