eras! Moral without intellectual culture, is nothing; but
with the latter, the former comes as a necessary sequence.

All individual examples are rejected. As all things act in harmony, we
can only draw deductions by regarding the race in the aggregate, and
studying its progress through long periods of time. Statistics is the
basis of all generalizations, and it is only from a close comparison of
these, for ages, that the harmonious movement of all things can be
clearly proved.

Mr. Buckle was a fatalist in every sense of the word. Marriages, deaths,
births, crime--all are regulated by Law. The moral status of a community
is illustrated by the number of depredations committed, and their
character. Following the suggestions of M. Quetelot, he brings forward
an array of figures to prove that not only, in a large community, is
there about the same number of crimes committed each year, but their
character is similar, and even the instruments employed in committing
them are nearly the same. Of course, outside circumstances modify this
slightly--such as financial failures, scarcity of bread, etc., but by a
comparison of long periods of time, these influences recur with perfect
regularity.

It is not the individual, in any instance, who is the criminal--but
society. The murderer and the suicide are not responsible, but are
merely public executioners. Through them the depravity of the _public_
finds vent.

Free Will and Predestination--the two dogmas which have, more than any
others, agitated the public mind--are discussed at length. Of course he
accepts the latter theory, but under a different name. Free Will, he
contends, inevitably leads to aristocracy, and Predestination to
democracy; and the British and Scottish churches are cited as examples
of the effect of the two doctrines on ecclesiastical organizations. The
former is an aristocracy, the latter a democracy.

No feature of Mr. Buckle's work is so prominent as its democratic
tendencies. The people, and the means by which they can be elevated,
were uppermost in his mind, and he disposes of established usages, and
aristocratic institutions, in a manner far more American than English.
It is this circumstance which has endeared him to the people of this
country, and to the liberals of Germany--the work having been translated
into German. For the same reason, he was severely criticised in England.

Having devoted the first volume to a discussion of the laws of
civiliz