and whatever is, is consequently right, the villanies of miscreants included. The Essay swarms with contradictions, and in other passages Pope treats man as an accountable being who departs from the commands of his Maker. Of physical evil, or suffering, Pope notices only "plagues, earthquakes, and tempests," which he justifies by the remark that God "acts not by partial, but by general laws."[815] Bolingbroke gave the same explanation. Either, he said, such visitations are "rational chastisements," or they are "the mere effects, natural though contingent, of matter and motion in a material system, put into motion under certain general laws."[816] Individuals, that is, must suffer that the laws of matter may not be infringed. Leibnitz rejected the principle. "That which is an evil," he said, "for me would not cease to be an evil because it would be good for some one else. The good which pervades the universe consists, among other things, in this, that the general good is the particular good of every one who loves the author of all good." So, he says again, "we suffer often from the misdeeds of others, but when we have no share in the crime we may hold it for certain that the sufferings procure us a greater happiness."[817] The system of Pope subordinates moral agents to physical, and he finds it a sufficient vindication that the mechanical law is general, and the injury to men only occasional. Whatever may be the worth of particular persons, he believes that they are properly sacrificed to the regularity of material laws, which roll on with undistinguishing, terrific might, crushing any thinking, sentient, virtuous being who may happen to cross their path. He supposes, nevertheless, that these unbending, undiscerning laws have undergone a "change," and, what is singular, the alteration has been from better to worse, whereby he accounts for a portion of the prevalent physical evil.[818] Another portion he at one time ascribed to "chance," which had intruded itself into the arrangements of the Almighty, and overruled his designs.[819] The optimism which represented man to be the sport of mechanical laws, of deteriorating changes in the physical system, and of blind, ungovernable chance, was not an optimism to clear away difficulties, and silence objections.