Page:Voltaire (Hamley).djvu/114

 merchants, artisans, lastly of labourers, who exercise the first and most despised of callings—the people, I say, were regarded by them as animals below man. It was far from advisable that these should have part in the government—they were villeins; their labour, their blood, belonged to their masters, who called themselves nobles. The great majority in Europe was what it still is in many countries—serfs of a lord, a species of cattle bought and sold with the land. Ages were necessary to do justice to humanity—to perceive that it was horrible that the great number should sow and the small number reap; and is it not happy for the French that the authority of these minor brigands has been extinguished in France by the legitimate power of the kings, as it has been in England by that of king and people?"

This last sentence is one of his ironical touches. The state of the French peasantry was shocking, as nobody knew better than Voltaire; the "minor brigands," of whom, perhaps, the Chevalier Rohan-Chabot was one, were in full exercise of their oppressive privileges, and so became a chief cause of the Revolution.

"Everything proves," he says, "that the English are bolder and more philosophic than we. A good deal of time must elapse before a certain degree of reason and of intellectual courage can cross the Straits of Dover."

The remaining letters treat chiefly of our philosophers—Bacon, Locke, and Newton—of our Tragedy and Comedy, and of our poets and men of letters. The essay on Locke concludes thus:—

"It is neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Bayle, nor Spinosa, nor Hobbes, nor my Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr Collins, nor Mr Toland, &c., who have lighted the torch of discord in their country; it is, for the most part, those theologians who, having had first the ambition of being chiefs of a sect,