, in which
the princes themselves have no interest; there are others which they
only allow themselves to practise, because public opinion is not yet
fixed as to their injustice, and their mischievous consequences. People
deserve far better from a nation for attacking these abuses with
clearness, with courage, and above all by interesting the sentiment of
humanity, than for any amount of eloquent reproach. Where there is no
insult, there is seldom any offence.... There is no form of government
without certain drawbacks, which the governments themselves would fain
have it in their power to remedy, or without abuses which they nearly
all intend to repress at least at some future day. We may therefore
serve them all by treating questions of the public good in a calm and
solid style; not coldly, still less with extravagance, but with that
interesting warmth which springs from a profound feeling for justice and
love of order."[101]

[101] _Oeuv._, ii. 795-798.

Of course it is a question whether, even in 1758, a generation before
the convulsion, it was possible for the French monarchy spontaneously to
work out the long list of indispensable improvements; still, at that
date, Turgot might be excused for thinking that the progress which he
desired might be attained without the violence to which Helvetius's
diatribes so unmistakably pointed. His words, in any case, are worth
quoting for their own grave and universal sense, and because they place
us exactly at the point of view for regarding _L'Esprit_ rightly. He
seizes on its political aspect, its assault on government, and the
social ordering of the time, as containing the book's real drift. In
this, as in the rest of the destructive literature of the first sixty
years of the century, the church was no doubt that part of the social
foundations against which the assault was most direct and most
vindictive, and it was the church, in the case of Helvetius's book, that
first took alarm. Indeed, we may say that, from the very nature of
things, in whatever direction the revolutionary host moved, they were
sure to find themselves confronted by the church. It lay across the
track of light at every point. Voltaire pierced its dogma. Rousseau
shamed its irreligious temper. Diderot brought into relief the vicious
absoluteness of its philosophy. Then came Helvetius and Holbach, not
merely with criticism, but with substitutes. Holbach brought a new dogma
of the universe, matter and m