joined in opening a fire of scathing criticism on existing laws, customs, and institutions. They exposed the abuses and sufferings incident to the use of torture, serfdom, and the slave trade, to excessive centralisation and interference with trade and agriculture, to close guilds, feudal duties, internal custom-houses, to the _taille_ and the _gabelle_, and demanded the carrying out of reforms which should set trade and industry free, destroy class and provincial privileges, introduce unity in the administration, and equality of rights between man and man. ♦Rousseau.♦ The Voltairians were specially characterised by their attack upon the Church and Christianity; the Economists by the importance which they attached to individual liberty. Neither regarded the ignorant and oppressed masses as able to act for themselves, and both looked to the royal power, enlightened by a free press, as the instrument through which reform must be effected. Rousseau was a writer of a different stamp. Instead of idolising knowledge he declared the untaught peasant and artisan the superiors of the philosopher and man of culture. They alone, he said, had retained that natural goodness of heart which men had in times long since gone by, when social inequalities along with idleness and luxury were unknown. Rousseau opposed also the atheistic tendencies of the day, declaring belief in a personal God and the immortality of the soul requisite to make life endurable to the oppressed. His indifference to knowledge and culture caused him to regard the masses themselves as alone able to regenerate France, if indeed regeneration were still possible. Society, according to him, was originally based on a contract by which every citizen in return for protection of person and property placed himself under the general will. Laws, therefore, were the expression of the general will; kings were merely the servants of the people, and not they but the people sovereign. Whatever was amiss in France, or in other countries, the fault lay purely with society and government, and should ever idleness and luxury disappear and the people recover their lost sovereignty, then and then only, as in primitive times, would men be happy and virtuous. ‘Man is born free,’ were the opening words of the ‘Social Contract,’ the book in which these theories were maintained, ‘and everywhere he is in chains.’ CHAPTER II. FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XVI. (1774–1789).