ers were Catholics, so also was Las Casas, the apostle of
justice and mercy. Still the fact remains, that the doctrine of moral
obligations towards the lower races had not yet taken its place in
Europe, any more than the doctrine of our obligation to the lower
animals, our ministers and companions, has yet taken its place among
Italians and Spaniards. The fact remains, that the old Christianity in
the sixteenth century was unable to deal effectively with the new
conditions in which the world found itself. As Catholicism now in France
in the eighteenth century proved itself unable to harmonise the new
moral aspirations and new social necessities of the time with the
ancient tradition, Raynal was right in telling over again the afflicting
story of her earlier failure, and in identifying the creed that murdered
Calas and La Barre before their own eyes, with the creed that had
blasted the future of the fairest portion of the new world two centuries
before.

The mere circumstance, however, that the book was one long and powerful
innuendo against the Church, would not have been enough to secure its
vast popularity. Attacks on the Church had become cheap by this time.
The eighteenth century, as it is one of the chief aims of these studies
to show, had a positive side of at least equal importance and equal
strength with its negative side. As we have so often said, its writers
were inspired by zeal for political justice, for humanity, for better
and more equal laws, for the amelioration of the common lot,--a zeal
which in energy, sincerity, and disinterestedness, has never been
surpassed. Raynal's work was perhaps, on the whole, the most vigorous
and sustained of all the literary expressions that were given to the
great social ideas of the century. It wholly lacked the strange and
concentrated glow that burned in the pages of the Social Contract; on
the other hand, it was more full of movement, of reality, of vivid and
picturesque incident. It was popular, and it was concrete. Raynal's
story went straight to the hearts of many people, to whom Rousseau's
arguments were only half intelligible and wholly dreary. It was that
book of the eighteenth century which brought the lower races finally
within the pale of right and duty in the common opinion of France. The
engravings that face the title-page in each of the seven volumes give
the keynote to the effect that the seven volumes produced. In one we see
a philosopher writing on a col