ed.

Voltaire, who was both the flatterer and the satirist of despotism, took
another line. His forte lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions
which priest-craft, united with state-craft, had interwoven with
governments. It was not from the purity of his principles, or his love
of mankind (for satire and philanthropy are not naturally concordant),
but from his strong capacity of seeing folly in its true shape, and his
irresistible propensity to expose it, that he made those attacks. They
were, however, as formidable as if the motive had been virtuous; and he
merits the thanks rather than the esteem of mankind.

On the contrary, we find in the writings of Rousseau, and the Abbe
Raynal, a loveliness of sentiment in favour of liberty, that excites
respect, and elevates the human faculties; but having raised this
animation, they do not direct its operation, and leave the mind in love
with an object, without describing the means of possessing it.

The writings of Quesnay, Turgot, and the friends of those authors, are
of the serious kind; but they laboured under the same disadvantage with
Montesquieu; their writings abound with moral maxims of government, but
are rather directed to economise and reform the administration of the
government, than the government itself.

But all those writings and many others had their weight; and by the
different manner in which they treated the subject of government,
Montesquieu by his judgment and knowledge of laws, Voltaire by his wit,
Rousseau and Raynal by their animation, and Quesnay and Turgot by their
moral maxims and systems of economy, readers of every class met with
something to their taste, and a spirit of political inquiry began
to diffuse itself through the nation at the time the dispute between
England and the then colonies of America broke out.

In the war which France afterwards engaged in, it is very well known
that the nation appeared to be before-hand with the French ministry.
Each of them had its view; but those views were directed to different
objects; the one sought liberty, and the other retaliation on England.
The French officers and soldiers who after this went to America, were
eventually placed in the school of Freedom, and learned the practice as
well as the principles of it by heart.

As it was impossible to separate the military events which took place in
America from the principles of the American Revolution, the publication
of those events in France