ltaire's own
hardihood as a consequence of the example which the other set him.

The rivalry between the schools of Rousseau and Voltaire represents the
deadlock to which social thought had come; a deadlock of which the
catastrophe of the Revolution was both expression and result. At the
time of Voltaire's death there was not a single institution in France
with force enough to be worth a month's purchase. The monarchy was
decrepit; the aristocracy was as feeble and impotent as it was arrogant;
the _bourgeoisie_ was not without aspiration, but it lacked courage and
it possessed no tradition; and the Church was demoralized, first by the
direct attack of Voltaire and the not less powerful indirect attack of
the _Encyclopaedia_, and second by the memory of its own cruelty and
selfishness in the generation just closing. But Voltaire's theory, so
far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal
order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had
transformed thought and prepared the way for a _regime_ of enlightenment
and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of
passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of
freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of
rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by
law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It
was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order
until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had
gradually thrown off the demoralizing burden of superstition. But then
the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were
practically extinct, and consequently such an attack as Rousseau's was
inevitable, and was at the same time and for the same reasons
irresistible. To overthrow the power of the Church only was to do
nothing in a society perishing from material decay and political
emasculation. Yet to regenerate such a society without the aid of moral
and spiritual forces, with whose activity the existence of a dominant
ecclesiastical power was absolutely incompatible, was one of the wildest
feats that ever passionate sophist attempted.

GEORGE W. KITCHIN

Two sayings which characterize the two speakers are recorded of this
time. The one is that of Louis XV, who with all his odious vices, his
laziness, and unkingly seclusion, was not devoid of intelligence. "All
this," he