do the best for itself in the battle of life. The French
Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to
convert the world some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought
not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances, the puppet of
institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the
modern world out of the decay of the mediaeval world, the French
_philosophes_ and encyclopaedists are, of course, the most notorious.
They confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had
come from England. They were, or considered themselves, the disciples of
Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.

And first, a few words on these same _philosophes_. One may be
thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of their sins, moral as well as
intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them
fairly--which can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any
fair judgment of them will, I think, lead to the conclusion that they
were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind
had as yet held sacred. Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred
thing they reverenced, which men had forgotten more and more since the
seventeenth century--common justice and common humanity. It was this, I
believe, which gave them their moral force. It was this which drew
towards them the hearts, not merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on
the _menu peuple_ they had no influence, and did not care to have any),
but of every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations
than those of a mere selfish tyrant--Frederick the Great, Christina of
Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine of
Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance--Voltaire.
We may question his being a philosopher at all. We may deny that he had
even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt much whether he had
any of that human and humorous common sense, which is often a good
substitute for the philosophy of the schools. We may feel against him a
just and honest indignation when we remember that he dared to travestie
into a foul satire the tale of his country's purest and noblest heroine;
but we must recollect, at the same time, that he did a public service to
the morality of his own country, and of all Europe, by his
indigna