s increased by its religions, by its governments, by
its opinions, in a word, by all the institutions that _it was led to
adopt_ on the plea of ameliorating its lot."[148] _On lui fit adopter!_
But who were the _on_, and how did they work? With what instruments and
what fulcrum? Never was the convenience of this famous abstract
substantive more fatally abused. And if religion, government, and
opinion had all aggravated the miseries of the human race, what had
lessened them? For the Encyclopaedic school never attempted, as Rousseau
did, to deny that the world had, as a matter of fact, advanced towards
happiness. It was because the Holbachians looked on mankind as slaves
held in an unaccountable bondage, which they must necessarily be eager
to throw off, that their movement, after doing at the Revolution a
certain amount of good in a bad way, led at last to a mischievous
reaction in favour of Catholicism.

[147] See Lange, i. 85.

[148] _Syst. de la Nat._, I. xvi.

Far more immediately significant than the philosophy of the _System of
Nature_ were the violence, directness, and pertinacity of its assault
upon political government. Voltaire, as has so often been noticed, had
always abstained from meddling with either the theory or the practical
abuses of the national administration. All his shafts had been levelled
at ecclesiastical superstition. Rousseau, indeed, had begun the most
famous of his political speculations by crying that man, who was born
free, is now everywhere in chains. But Rousseau was vague, abstract, and
sentimental. In the _System of Nature_ we have a clear presage of the
trenchant and imperious invective which, twenty years after its
publication, rang in all men's ears from the gardens of the Palais Royal
and the benches of the Jacobins' Hall. The writer has plainly made up
his mind that the time has at last come for dropping all the discreet
machinery of apologue and parable, and giving to his words the edge of a
sharpened sword. The vague disguises of political speculation, and the
mannered reservations of a Utopia or New Atlantis, are exchanged for a
passionate, biting, and loudly practical indictment. All over the world
men are under the yoke of masters who neglect the instruction of their
people, or only seek to cheat and deceive them. The sovereigns in every
part of the globe are unjust, incapable, made effeminate by luxury,
corrupted by flattery, depraved by license and impunity, destit