position between the man whose means of
subsistence are assured and can be transmitted to his family and the man
whose means depend on his work and are limited by the term of his own
life [Footnote: He looked forward to the mitigation of this inequality
by the development of life insurance which was then coming to the
front.]; and inequality in education. He did not propose any radical
methods for dealing with these difficulties, which he thought would
diminish in time, without, however, entirely disappearing. He was too
deeply imbued with the views of the Economists to be seduced by the
theories of Rousseau, Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating
communism or the abolition of private property.

Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised society,
Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of the earth,--a
uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the obliteration of the
distinction between advanced and retrograde races. The backward peoples,
he prophesied, will climb up to the condition of France and the United
States of America, for no people is condemned never to exercise its
reason. If the dogma of the perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by
any restrictions, is granted, this is a logical inference, and we
have already seen that it was one of the ideas current among the
philosophers.

Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous
conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a
considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical science.
We need only note this. More interesting is the prediction that, even
if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is inalterable,
the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental operations will be
augmented by the invention of new instruments and methods.

The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature, and
to have produced a survey of any durable value would have required
the equipment of a Gibbon. Condorcet was not even as well equipped as
Voltaire. [Footnote: But as he wrote without books the Sketch was a
marvellous tour de force.] The significance of his Sketch lies in this,
that towards the close of an intellectual movement it concentrated
attention on the most important, though hitherto not the most prominent,
idea which that movement had disseminated, and as it were officially
announced human Progress as the leading problem that claimed the
interest of ma