evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at
any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have
issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic
struggle for revenge and bread.

There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by
circumstances. Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state;
some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but
in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new
forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain),
but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and
original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with
power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord
and Giver of Life.

Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in England and in
Germany. But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny
of that great nation for awhile--perhaps for ever.

M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which
appears at first sight to militate against my belief--a chapter "showing
that France was the country in which men had become most alike."

"The men," he says, "of that time, especially those belonging to the
upper and middle ranks of society, who alone were at all conspicuous,
were all exactly alike."

And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle
classes, it must have been still more true of the mass of the lowest
population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded--or rather