emplation
of so remote a difficulty. An event at such a distance might fairly be
left to providence, but the truth is that if the view of the argument
given in this Essay be just the difficulty, so far from being remote,
would be imminent and immediate. At every period during the progress of
cultivation, from the present moment to the time when the whole earth
was become like a garden, the distress for want of food would be
constantly pressing on all mankind, if they were equal. Though the
produce of the earth might be increasing every year, population would
be increasing much faster, and the redundancy must necessarily be
repressed by the periodical or constant action of misery or vice.

Mr Condorcet's Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit
Humain, was written, it is said, under the pressure of that cruel
proscription which terminated in his death. If he had no hopes of its
being seen during his life and of its interesting France in his favour,
it is a singular instance of the attachment of a man to principles,
which every day's experience was so fatally for himself contradicting.
To see the human mind in one of the most enlightened nations of the
world, and after a lapse of some thousand years, debased by such a
fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge,
ambition, madness, and folly as would have disgraced the most savage
nation in the most barbarous age must have been such a tremendous shock
to his ideas of the necessary and inevitable progress of the human mind
that nothing but the firmest conviction of the truth of his principles,
in spite of all appearances, could have withstood.

This posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much larger work,
which he proposed should be executed. It necessarily, therefore, wants
that detail and application which can alone prove the truth of any
theory. A few observations will be sufficient to shew how completely
the theory is contradicted when it is applied to the real, and not to
an imaginary, state of things.

In the last division of the work, which treats of the future progress
of man towards perfection, he says, that comparing, in the different
civilized nations of Europe, the actual population with the extent of
territory, and observing their cultivation, their industry, their
divisions of labour, and their means of subsistence, we shall see that
it would be impossible to preserve the same means of subsistence, and,
conse