d his _Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind_, left his garret, and went out to meet his death. A year
later, as if to show that the great prodigal hope could survive the
brain that conceived it, the representatives of the French people had
it circulated as a national document.

Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of human
faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent
of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the
duration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but
the ultimate end was sure. Twenty years before, Turgot projecting a
system of universal education in France, had promised to transform the
nation in ten years. Condorcet was less sanguine, but his perspective
was short. The indefinite advance of mankind presupposed, he argued, the
elimination of inequality (1) among peoples, and (2) among classes, and
lastly the perfection of the individual. For all this he believed that
the Revolution had already laid the foundation. Negro slavery, for
example, would end; Africa would enter on a phase of culture dependent
on settled agriculture, and the East adopt free institutions. The time
was at hand when the sun would rise only on free men, and tyrants,
slaves, and priests would live only in history. The Revolution had
proclaimed the equality of men, and the future would proceed to realise
it. Monopolies abolished, fortunes would tend to a level of equality,
and a system of insurance (Dr. Price's specific) would mitigate or
abolish poverty. Universal education would reduce the natural inequality
of talents, and break down the barriers of class, so that men, retaining
still the desire to be instructed by others, would no longer need to be
controlled by their superiors. Science had made a dizzy progress in the
past generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when general
education enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and by
women as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as the
most formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denser
population would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposed
intensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankind
in self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with the
amendment of human institutions. Passion can be dominated by reflection,
and by the deliberate encouragement of