eir advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that
no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism." [Footnote: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
ch. xxxviii. ad fin.]

But Gibbon treats the whole subject as a speculation, and he treats
it without reference to any of the general principles on which French
thinkers had based their theory. He admits that his reasons for holding
that civilisation is secure against a barbarous cataclysm may be
considered fallacious; and he also contemplates the eventuality that
the fabric of sciences and arts, trade and manufacture, law and policy,
might be "decayed by time." If so, the growth of civilisation would have
to begin again, but not ab initio. For "the more useful or at least
more necessary arts," which do not require superior talents or national
subordination for their exercise, and which war, commerce, and religious
zeal have spread among the savages of the world, would certainly
survive.

These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the
doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally the
least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.

4.

The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement
among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government
no little alarm. The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose
Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the
American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon
which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no
less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke. The
Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised
with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to
Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly
preached revolution. But the most important speculative work of the
time, William Godwin's Political Justice, escaped the censorship because
it was not published at a popular price. [Footnote: Godwin had helped to
get Paine's book published in 1791, and he was intimate with the group
of revolutionary spirits who were persecuted by the Government. A good
account of the episode will be found in Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin,
and their Circle.]

The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in
1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the