the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but the ultimate end was sure. Twenty years before, Turgot projecting a system of universal education in France, had promised to transform the nation in ten years. Condorcet was less sanguine, but his perspective was short. The indefinite advance of mankind presupposed, he argued, the elimination of inequality (1) among peoples, and (2) among classes, and lastly the perfection of the individual. For all this he believed that the Revolution had already laid the foundation. Negro slavery, for example, would end; Africa would enter on a phase of culture dependent on settled agriculture, and the East adopt free institutions. The time was at hand when the sun would rise only on free men, and tyrants, slaves, and priests would live only in history. The Revolution had proclaimed the equality of men, and the future would proceed to realise it. Monopolies abolished, fortunes would tend to a level of equality, and a system of insurance (Dr. Price's specific) would mitigate or abolish poverty. Universal education would reduce the natural inequality of talents, and break down the barriers of class, so that men, retaining still the desire to be instructed by others, would no longer need to be controlled by their superiors. Science had made a dizzy progress in the past generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when general education enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and by women as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as the most formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denser population would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposed intensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankind in self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with the amendment of human institutions. Passion can be dominated by reflection, and by the deliberate encouragement of gentle and altruistic sentiments. The business of politics is to destroy the opposition between self-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a man seeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. A great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of the inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France while Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been ruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a perpetual confederation of mankind.

It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faith in the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy, and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvétius and Holbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which made for itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking of men than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn to choose of two alternative views the one which would favour this sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion," for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political institutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is institutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and destruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, the unchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvétius) that human nature is itself the product of "education" or, as we should call it, "environment." Circumstances and above all political institutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, are gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutions and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of prejudice and despotism.

Wordsworth's "shades of the prison-house" which close upon the growing boy, were an echo of this thought. Godwin's friend, Holcroft, embodied it in a striking metaphor: "Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings and higher propensities of the soul are, as it were shrunk up, scared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse in the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future situation in life."

The men of the Revolution phrased that idea each in his own way, according as they had been influenced, primarily, by Rousseau, Helvétius, or Condorcet. It gave to their controversy with Burke the appearance, not so much of a dispute between rival schools, as of a dialogue between men who spoke to each other in unknown tongues.

Burke condescended to reason with Dr. Price. But the main answer of authority to the friends of the French Revolution, was the answer which Burke prescribed for "infidels"—"a refutation by criminal justice." A curious parallel movement towards extremes went on simultaneously in the two camps. While Burke separated himself from Fox, split the Whig party, and devoted his genius to the task of fanning the general English dislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, the progressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the "intellectuals," and passed from a humdrum demand for political reform into a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up in all the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. "An honest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein each individual will have his representative." Of these the most active, the most extreme, and the best organised was undoubtedly the London Corresponding Society.

It was founded by a Scottish boot-maker named Thomas Hardy. The sober, limited character of the man is plain to read in his records and pamphlets. The son of a sea-captain, who had had his education in a village school in Perthshire where the scholars paid a penny a week, he was a leading member of the Scots' Kirk in Covent Garden, and had drawn his political education not at all from godless French philosophers, but from the Protestant fanatic, Lord George Gordon, and from Dr. Price's book on the American War. He gathered his own friends together to found his society, and nine of them met for the first time in the "Bell" tavern in Exeter Street in January, 1792. "They had finished their daily labour and met there by appointment. After having their bread and cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some conversation, on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life, which they in common with their fellow-citizens felt to their sorrow, the business for which they had met was brought forward—Parliamentary Reform."

The Corresponding Society drew the bulk of its members from tradesmen, mechanics and shopkeepers, who contributed their penny a week, and organised itself under Hardy's methodical guidance into numerous branches each with twenty members. It is said to have counted in the end some 30,000 members in London alone. It was a focus of discontent and hope which soon attracted men of more conspicuous talents and wider experience. Horne Tooke, man about town, ex-clergyman, and philologist, who