est, safeguard for
poor humanity.

1867

LECTURE I--CASTE

[Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.]

These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the
French Revolution. To English society, past or present, I do not refer.
For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory
discourse, there never was any Ancien Regime in England.

Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which
might have led to a political condition like that of the Continent, all
classes combined and exterminated them; while the course of English
society went on as before.

On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which
undermined, and at last destroyed, the Ancien Regime.

From England went forth those political theories which, transmitted from
America to France, became the principles of the French Revolution. From
England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense results.
It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a
certain famous passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the
world--of the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are English.
"It is," he says, "neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza,
nor Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, nor
Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried the torch of discord into their
countries." It is worth notice, that not only are the majority of these
names English, but that they belong not to the latter but to the former
half of the eighteenth century; and indeed, to the latter half of the
seventeenth.

So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, which helped more than
all to break up the superstitions of the Ancien Regime, and to set man
face to face with the facts of the universe. From England, towards the
end of the seventeenth century, it was promulgated by such men as Newton,
Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and the first founders of our Royal Society.

In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries--and especially that of a body which I can never
mention without most deep respect--the Society of Friends. At a time
when the greater part of the Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these
men were reasserting doctrines concerning man, and his relation to his
Creator, which, whether or not all believe them (as I believe them) to be
founded on eternal fact, all must confess