l kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to
be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of
the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation
has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its
argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been
in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and
innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree
caused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific
analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the
history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from
a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter
which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the
argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are
only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What
really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears,
is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli
Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"--and so on in
the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in
Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our
time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind
of every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau
himself: "People al