hteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date
of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its
beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great
disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At
its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence
until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727
and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were
only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which
every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of
an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique,
such as the world has never at any other time beheld.

In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the
long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his
days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright,
resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost
exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In
the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and
Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods
of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.

It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation
after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau,
Diderot, Helvetius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume,
so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because
penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which
they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between
1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these
fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
Robespierre.[1] The only other illustrious European of this decade was
Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of
the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot
tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by
the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of
time. The accident is in itself only worth calling attention to, in
connection with his distance from them in other and more important
points than time.

[Footnote 1: Born i