[192] Code de la Nature.

[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbe de St. Pierre. Conf., viii. 264.  And also in the analysis of this very Discourse, above, vol. i. p. 163.

[194] “I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the visage freely expressed.  Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place.  In such a community all are nearly equal.  There are none of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries inevitably creates.  All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his neighbour’s right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every race of man.  Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals.  It is true that among those classes who have no wants that cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has great influence, the rights of others are fully respected.  It is true, also, that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include within them all the brotherhood of man.  But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it.”  Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.

[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, “For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history.” (Quoted in Egger’s Hellenisme en France, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the next generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers.

[196] Doutes sur l’Ordre Naturel; Oeuv., xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)

[197] La Legislation, I. i.

[198] Ibid.

[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely political.  That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some members, one can hardly doubt.  See Von Sybel’s Hist. of the French Revolution, Bk.  II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet’s La Revolution, ii. 90-107, on the other.