t they overthrew the system that was crushing them, and purged
themselves with fire and sword of those who administered and maintained
it, defying the hopes of the nation; and then successfully encountered
the giant's task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, and
reconstructing the fabric of their own society with the other? The
answer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition of
France. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenth
century, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in
the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the
twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation of
Catholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but corruption
remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror
and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what
inspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possible
new, was the spiritual preparation that had been in swift progress since
the third decade of the century. The forms and methods of this
preparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath its
influence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and the
schools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots,
all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief
in human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. They
impregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is true
that we find Voltaire complaining towards the close of his days, of the
century being satiated and weary, _un siecle degoute_, not knowing well
what it wanted. 'The public,' he said, 'has been eighty years at table,
and now it drinks a little bad cognac at the end of its meal.'[10] In
literature and art this was true; going deeper than these, the public
was eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and more
fruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keen
appetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, men had now risen
up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after
social righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, by
this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionate
conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. That
destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously
confine