we begin by doubting of our right to kill our fellow-creatures, and we end by lamenting our blindness. Ah! if we were born for these massacres, God would not have placed in our bosoms conscience, which attaches only remorse to their perpetration, the moral sentiment which condemns them, and the reason which curses them. He would not have vivified the human soul with the sentiments of the sublime and the infinite, which raise it up to heaven, if he had wished an earth for the conflicts of tigers and the work of the executioner.

All the faculties which distinguish us from the brute have a horror of bloodshed, and all these faculties tend to the love of God and of men.

This is our law, the law which will one day annihilate war upon the earth. It is human, it is divine; it is derived both from heaven and earth, like the creature to whom it has been given.

APPRECIATION

CHAPTER XXXII.

OF THE LAWS OF CRETE, SPARTA, ATHENS, AND ROME, BY THE LAWS OF NATURE.

"Les nations Grècque et Romaine ont disparu du monde à cause de ce qu'il y avait de barbare c'est à dire d'injuste dans leurs institutions."

MADAME DE STAEL. Considérations sur la Révolution Française.

EMPIRES, like men, are born and cease to exist. Their elevation in proportion as they approach to truth, their decline in proportion as they separate themselves from it,

is an immense fact which strikes all eyes, and of which humanity will one day reap the fruits.

Hence it results that the superiority of a civilised over a barbarous people is entirely moral. Numbers and strength give way before the action of a lofty sentiment or of a virtuous thought.

Twice in the annals of the world, the love of a little corner of the globe which received the name of country has bestowed empire upon a handful of men. Had they been just, they would have preserved this empire; there is no instance of a nation's dying while in the practice of heroism and virtue.

All have succumbed beneath the weight of superstitions, of ambitions, of corruption, of ignorance, and of inhumanity. All have died from having forgotten the dignity of man, and violated the laws of nature.

It would be an act of high justice to place Sparta, Athens, and Rome, the constant objects of our admiration in youth, in the presence of the laws of nature, and to judge them by these laws.

With what surprise should we not see the greatest geniuses of antiquity mutilate man, in order to make him bend to their conceptions; make him great, as God has made animals free and powerful, by limiting them to a single instinct; and seek in an isolated law of nature (the love of country) the spring of a moral superiority which was able to regenerate a people, and to govern the rest of the world to whom this law remained unknown; for in this law was concentrated the true spirit of the legislators of Greece. Man appeared to them a being too active and too great; and not being able to imagine a means of entirely subjecting him, they divided him and made him incomplete. They cut off one half, and said to the other half,

Advance, fight, destroy; be the strongest, and thou wilt be free.

The child trained up to war, receiving from education but two ideas-the love of his native town, and the contempt of all other civilisations,-the man living free only on condition of his renouncing the exercise of his own will; repelling as a weakness all the arts, all the sciences, which might have enlightened and polished him-seeing on the rest of the earth nothing but enemies, barbarians, and countries to be conquered, or slaves to be enchained; separating himself, in fact, from all other nations by pride, and from the human race by ignorance; such was the humanity of ancient times: such was the law imposed upon the heroic nations of Greece.

To limit a people to one sole idea, to allow it only one passion, and to unloose this passion against the world : such was the essence of a republican government as it existed at Crete, Sparta, Athens, and Rome, and this government was based upon the same principle as is a despotic government.

In a republican government the people is the despot, and its subjects are all the nations which surround it. Its caprices and its desires turn the world upside down; others must either serve it, or die.

Thus, the greatest effort of ancient legislation was to transfer despotism from the master to the subject; to imbue a nation with the will of a tyrant. They gave to this thing the name of liberty, and the violation of all the laws of nature was termed virtue.

And, let it not be supposed that I would deny the glorious influences of those institutions. Their action was frequently heroic. We have seen emanate from them some sublime characters, and instances of noble devotedness: they gave universal dominion to a handful of men,

P

but they did nothing for the happiness of Greece; they did little for the advancement of humanity.

It has been said that these institutions have become impossible at the present day because we are wanting in virtue. It would have been more true to say that they could not be reproduced because they violate three of the great laws of nature which are now recognised by all civilised nations. The sentiment of the Divinity, that is to say, the knowledge and the love of one only God; the sentiment of sociability, that is to say, the unity of the human species; and lastly, perfectibility, which does not allow the human race to retrograde towards the past. All the virtues of Sparta, Rome, and Athens, were hostile to humanity; we could not return to them without degrading ourselves. What European people could coolly hunt down the Helots as the law of Sparta decreed? What father would consent to sell his son three times over, or to kill him, as was permitted by the Roman law? What hero could make war for the sake of pillage and carnage, and on the smoking ruins of seventy cities would dare to sell by auction a hundred and fifty thousand citizens, in order to distribute the money to his army, as Paulus Emilius did in Epirus? which procured him the honours of a triumph, together with the admiration of the Roman people, and almost that of posterity.

The reign of Rome was that of a robber: it aggrandized itself by war and pillage, and therefore it fell by its riches and by war.

Let us no longer say that these institutions are become impossible because we are wanting in virtue; let us rather say, that they are become impossible because humanity and truth are beginning to prevail upon the earth.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

OF THE HOPES OF THE FUTURE.

"Je n'ai vu dans la liberté que tous les hommes reclament, que le développement harmonique de leurs facultés."

BONSTETTEN, Etude de l'Homme.

"Le gout et l'admiration du stationnaire viennent des jugemens faux que l'on porte sur la vérité des faits, et sur la nature de l'homme : sur la vérité des faits, parcequ'on suppose que les anciens mœurs étaient plus pures qué les mœurs modernes; complete erreur: sur la nature de l'homme, parcequ'on ne veut pas voir que l'esprit humain est perfectible."

CHATEAUBRIAND.

THIS cursory examination of human laws, as confronted with the laws of nature, has shown us the world shaking off its chains, and advancing with rapid strides towards truth. In order to complete this picture, let us cast our eyes upon the moral state of the world, not within the narrow limits of the kingdoms into which the ground is partitioned off, but in the large divisions established by the different forms of belief which constitute various classes of their populations. The luminous point lies entirely in the progress of the Gospel, because the Gospel in its primitive purity is itself but the expression of the laws of nature. It is sufficient to appreciate this light in order to know the future destiny of the human race.

At the present day more than one-third of the inhabitants of the globe have received the law of Christ, and live beneath the influence of this law which gives life to nations. Europe is the centre of this new civilisation, of