its pursuits in phrases that are still too faithful to the fact, as ‘dissipation without pleasure, vanity without meaning, and idleness without repose.’ It was perhaps to soften the oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that in 1786 Condorcet married.[19]

Events were now very close at hand, in comparison with which even the most critical private transactions of Condorcet’s life were pale and insignificant. In the tranquil seasons of history, when the steady currents of circumstance bear men along noiseless, the importance of the relations which we contract seems superlative; in times of storm and social wreck these petty fortunes and private chances are engulfed and lost to sight. The ferment was now rapidly rising to its intensest height, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to the burning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly ten years ago he expressed his preference for political activity over the meditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into the Revolution with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixed and unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that the great ones whom he had known, the immortal Voltaire, the lofty-souled Turgot, had been carried away by the unkind gods, before their eyes had seen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign of justice on the earth. The gods after all were kinder than he knew, for they veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of ’89 the spectres of ’93. History might possibly miss most of its striking episodes, if every actor could know the work to which he was putting his hand; and even Condorcet’s faith might have wavered if he had known that between him and the fulfilment of his desires there was to intrude a long and deplorable period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision which then presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime; and just as, when some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it is a consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship, so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring social dreams, the wreck of the aspiration is not total nor unrecompensed. The next best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to have sought them.

During the winter of ’88 and ’89, while all France was astir with elections and preparation for elections for that meeting of the States-General, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a long night of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could best serve the movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides of their duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of the subjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which his countrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery and the slave trade.[20] With a terseness and force not always characteristic of his writings, he appealed to the electors, while they were reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forget the half-million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefully torn away from them, and whose need of justice was more urgent than their own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingenious protest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingo plantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly inconsistent it was with every idea of a free and popular chamber that men should sit as representatives of others who had never chosen them, and that they should invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the same instant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed natural rights of mankind in their own country.[21]

Of general precepts he never tired; one series of them followed another. To us many of them may seem commonplace; but we should reflect that the election of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, and Condorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of political inexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because he will follow his own interest and not yours; but at the same time beware of choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, because you need ability quite as much as you need probity. Do not choose a man who has ever taken sides against the liberty of any portion of mankind; nor one whose principles were never known until he found out that he wanted your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat of soul; because what you want is not heat but force, not violence but steadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man’s actions from the accidents of his life; for one may be the enemy or the victim of a tyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by a candidate’s solicitations; but at the same time, make allowance for the existing effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decided opinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation; those who are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity for the misfortunes of the people; those who speak of justice and reason, to those who speak of political interests and of the prosperity of commerce. Distrust those who appeal to sentiment in matters that can be decided by reason; prefer light to eloquence; and pass over those who declare themselves ready to die for liberty, in favour of those who know in what liberty consists.[22]

In another piece he drew up a list of the rights which the nation had a claim to have recognised, such as the right to make laws, to exact responsibility from the ministers of the crown, to the protection of personal liberty, and to the legal administration of justice by regular judges. These rights he declared it to be the first duty of the Assembly to draw up in a chart that should be the chief corner-stone of the new constitution. Then he proceeded to define the various tasks to which he conceived that the legislative body should forthwith apply itself; and among them, be it said, is no mention of any of those projects of confiscation which circumstances so speedily forced upon the Assembly when it met.[23]

Though many of these precepts designed to guide the electors in their choice of men are sagacious and admirable, they smack strongly of that absolute and abstract spirit which can never become powerful in politics without danger. It is certain that in the spring of ’89, Condorcet held hereditary monarchy to be most suitable to ‘the wealth, the population, the extent of France, and to the political system of Europe.’[24] Yet the reasons which he gives for thinking this are not very cogent, and he can hardly