ility of indefinitely moulding the characters
of men by laws and institutions--whether combined or not with a belief
in the natural equality of men's faculties--laid a foundation on which
the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked,
therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of
Progress.

It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its
applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van
of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may
appear irreclaimably barbarous--thus potentially including all humanity
in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total
mass of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared
that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and
that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their
circumstances. This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength
to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not
merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.

Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar
civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa,
was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone knows how
Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to
Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the
society of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the
Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772. It
is however, one of the remarkable books of the century. Its immediate
practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the
friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery. But it was
also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The
author's method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon
employed on a larger scale. A history of facts was a more formidable
indictment than any declamatory attack.

Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries
which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian
conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher
of Progress. He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages
of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society.
But he observes that "the human race is what we wish to ma