rnment by
opposition, by balance and control, is contrary to principle; whereas
absolutism might be requisite to the attainment of their higher
purpose. Nothing less than concentrated power could overcome the
obstacles to such beneficent reforms as they meditated. Men who sought
only the general good must wound every distinct and separate interest
of class, and would be mad to break up the only force that they could
count upon, and thus to throw away the means of preventing the evils
that must follow if things were left to the working of opinion and the
feeling of masses. They had no love for absolute power in itself, but
they computed that, if they had the use of it for five years, France
would be free. They distinguished an arbitrary monarch and the
irresistible but impersonal state.

It was the era of repentant monarchy. Kings had become the first of
public servants, executing, for the good of the people, what the
people were unable to do for themselves; and there was a reforming
movement on foot which led to many instances of prosperous and
intelligent administration. To men who knew what unutterable suffering
and wrong was inflicted by bad laws, and who lived in terror of the
uneducated and inorganic masses, the idea of reform from above seemed
preferable to parliamentary government managed by Newcastle and North,
in the interest of the British landlord. The economists are outwardly
and avowedly less liberal than Montesquieu, because they are
incomparably more impressed by the evils of the time, and the need of
immense and fundamental changes. They prepared to undo the work of
absolutism by the hand of absolutism. They were not its opponents,
but its advisers, and hoped to convert it by their advice. The
indispensable liberties are those which constitute the wealth of
nations; the rest will follow. The disease had lasted too long for the
sufferer to heal himself: the relief must come from the author of his
sufferings. The power that had done the wrong was still efficient to
undo the wrong. Transformation, infinitely more difficult in itself
than preservation, was not more formidable to the economists because
it consisted mainly in revoking the godless work of a darker age. They
deemed it their mission not to devise new laws, for that is a task
which God has not committed to man, but only to declare the inherent
laws of the existence of society and enable them to prevail.

The defects of the social and political o