e that scientific
discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world of 2440, its
intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses
in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow
for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient
appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the reformers acclaimed
and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value
of the principle. They did not see that in a society organised and
governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration
of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that
a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential
people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial
if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal
societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would
not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes,
whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.

4.

That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying
novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their
libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages
would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that
all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society
and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of "our
well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that
converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master
had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title
of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an
2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.

The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the
hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although
the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution,
[Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English translation ran to
a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.
Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and classical
antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man's
destinies from the point of view of a student of the re