He begins by brushing away the hypothesis of an Arcadia.  We know really nothing about primitive man, there is not sufficient evidence to authorise conjectures.  We know man only as he has existed in organised societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation and its prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an imaginary golden age but in a known historical epoch.  And we must be careful not to fall into the mistakes of confusing public prosperity with general happiness, and of considering only the duration or aggrandisement of empires and ignoring the lot of the common people.

His survey of history is summary and superficial enough.  He gives reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy.  Yet what about the Greeks?  Theirs was an age of enlightenment.  In a few pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, “We are compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was a time of pain and torture for humanity.”  And in ancient history, generally, “slavery alone sufficed to make man’s condition a hundred times worse than it is at present.”  The miseries of life in the Roman period are even more apparent than in the Greek.  What Englishman or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient Rome?  It is interesting to remember that four years later an Englishman who had an incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed greater happiness than at any other period.

Rome declined and Christianity came.  Its purpose was not to render men happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer, punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars waged more humanely.  The conclusion is that it is only those who are profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret “the good old times.”

Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly.  On the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in the Renaissance—­here agreeing with d’Alembert and Voltaire.  The intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress.  But alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent effects on the well-being of the people.  Nor indeed was there any perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding the progress of science and the arts.  But the terrible wars of this period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised in the past.