t by timorous
reactionaries at the time, that Christianity in various ways sapped the
strength of the Roman Empire, and opened the way for the barbarians. In
truth, the most careful and competent students know now that the Empire
slowly fell to pieces, partly because the political arrangements were
vicious and inadequate, but mainly because the fiscal and economic
system impoverished and depopulated one district of the vast empire
after another. It was the break-up of the Empire that gave the Church
its chance; not the Church that broke up the Empire. It is a mistake of
the same kind to suppose that the destructive criticism of the French
philosophers a hundred years ago was the great operative cause of the
catastrophe which befel the old social regime. If Voltaire, Diderot,
Rousseau, had never lived, or if their works had all been suppressed as
soon as they were printed, their absence would have given no new life to
agriculture, would not have stimulated trade, nor replenished the
bankrupt fisc, nor incorporated the privileged classes with the bulk of
the nation, nor done anything else to repair an organisation of which
every single part had become incompetent for its proper function. It was
the material misery and the political despair engendered by the reigning
system, which brought willing listeners to the feet of the teachers who
framed beneficent governments on the simple principles of reason and the
natural law. And these teachers only busied themselves with abstract
politics, because the real situation was desperate. They had no
alternative but to evolve social improvements out of their own
consciousness. There was not a single sound organ in the body politic,
which they could have made the starting-point of a reconstitution of a
society on the base of its actual or historic structure. The mischiefs
which resulted from their method are patent and undeniable. But the
method was made inevitable by the curse of the old regime.[34]

Nor is there any instance in history of mere opinion making a breach in
the essential constitution of a community, so long as the political
conditions were stable and the economic or nutritive conditions sound.
If some absolute monarch were to be seized by a philanthropic resolution
to transform the ordering of a society which seemed to be at his
disposal, he might possibly, by the perseverance of a lifetime, succeed
in throwing the community into permanent confusion. Joseph II. perhaps