liberty; but when their destinies are regarded at one view, it is clearly seen that they are advancing to a determined end, because while man is in restless agitation, God is leading him on.  The conquests of modern civilization are great and sacred realities.  What are these conquests?  Let us not stay at the surface of things, but go to the foundation.  Societies fallen into a condition of barbarism have for their motto the famous saying of a Gallic chief:  Woe to the vanquished!  In institutions, as in manners, the triumph of force characterizes barbarous times.  The right of the strongest is the twofold negation of justice and of love; and what characterizes civilization, issuing from the barbarous condition, the fragments of which it so long trails after it, is the establishment of that justice which founds States, and, upon the basis of justice, the development of the benevolence which renders communities happy.  These are the two essential conditions of social progress.  These conditions are necessary even to the progress of industry and of material welfare.

Modern civilization,—­that, namely, which we so designate, while we relegate, so to speak, into the past the contemporaneous societies of the vast East,—­modern civilization possesses a power unknown to antiquity.  Justice has a foundation in the conscience, benevolence has natural roots in the heart; but a moment has been when justice and love appeared in the world with new brightness, like rays disengaged from clouds.  Modern civilization was then deposited on the earth in a powerful germ, of which nothing was any more to arrest the growth.  That moment was when the idea of God appeared in its fulness:  modern civilization was born of the Gospel.  The knowledge of God strengthens justice, and the thought of the common Father develops benevolence.  These theses are well known; let us confine ourselves to a few rapid illustrations.

There exists an institution in which has been embodied the negation of social justice—­Slavery.  Slavery is at length disappearing before our eyes from the bosom of Christendom; and its final retreat is doing honor to Russia, and bathing America in blood.  This is perhaps the greatest of the events which the annals of history will inscribe on the page of the nineteenth century.  Now slavery was, in the past, an almost universal institution.  The finest intellects of Greece devoted a portion of their labors to its justification.  Rome, at the most brilliant period of its civilization, caused slaves to kill one another, in savage spectacles intended to delight the populace, or during sumptuous banquets for the amusement of wealthy debauchees![30] How has slavery disappeared little by little!  How has man been rediscovered beneath that living thing of which was made, one while an instrument of labor, and another while the sport of execrable passions?  Inquire into this history.  You will find the reason and the heart making their protests heard in antiquity, but