an
incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be
probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed
greater happiness than at any other period.

Rome declined and Christianity came. Its purpose was not to render men
happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious
or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer,
punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars
waged more humanely. The conclusion is that it is only those who are
profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret "the good old times."

Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any
attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On
the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in
the Renaissance--here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The
intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the
enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But
alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the
intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent
effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any
perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at
large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding
the progress of science and the arts. But the terrible wars of this
period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the
requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised
in the past.

Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but
especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and their
satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political bodies, like
organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by
pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls
back with more energy on useful objects; a more successful appeal can be
made to the rights of humanity; and princes, who have become creditors
and debtors of their subjects, permit them to be happy in order that
they may be more solvent or more patient.

This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that
intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-operation
of political events, and no political events would permanently help
humanity without the progress of knowledge.

Public felicity consists--Chastel