ute of
talent, manners, or virtue. Indifferent to their duties, which they
usually know nothing about, they are scarcely concerned for a single
moment of the day with the well-being of their people; their whole
attention is absorbed by useless wars, or by the desire to find at each
instant new means of gratifying their insatiable rapacity. The state of
society is a state of war between the sovereign and all the rest of its
members. In every country alike the morality of the people is wholly
neglected, and the one care of the government is to render them timorous
and wretched. The common man desires no more than bread; he wins it by
the sweat of his brow; joyfully would he eat it, if the injustice of the
government did not make it bitter in his mouth. By the insanity of
governments, those who are swimming in plenty, without being any the
happier for it, yet wring from the tiller of the soil the very fruits
that his arms have won from it. Injustice, by reducing indigence to
despair, drives it to seek in crime resources against the woes of life.
An iniquitous government breeds despair in men's souls; its vexations
depopulate the land, the fields remain untilled, famine, contagion, and
pestilence stalk over the earth. Then, embittered by misery, men's minds
begin to ferment and effervesce, and what inevitably follows is the
overthrow of a realm.[149]

[149] _Syst. de la Nat._, I. xiv., xvi., etc. etc.

If France had been prosperous, all this would have passed for the empty
declamation of an excited man of letters. As it was, such declamation
only described, in language as accurate as it was violent and stinging,
the real position of the country. In the urgency of a present material
distress, men were not over-careful that the basis of the indictment
should be laid in the principles of a sound historical philosophy of
society. We can hardly wonder at it. What is interesting, and what we do
not notice earlier in the century, is that in the _System of Nature_ the
revolt against the impotence of society, and the revolt against the
omnipotence of God, made a firm coalition. That coalition came to a
bloody end for the time, four-and-twenty years after Holbach's book
proclaimed it, when the Committee of Public Safety despatched Hebert,
and better men than Hebert, to the guillotine for being atheists.
Atheism, as Robespierre assured them, was aristocratic.

Holbach's work may be said to spring from the doctrine that the socia