tury. The same age that saw the laws of conduction and radiation of heat established by Prevost and Fourier, polarization of light by Malus, the theory of oxidization and respiration by Lavoisier, and the whole basis of future science by Buffon and Cuvier― the same age that saw such splendid progress in literature and science, was the witness, likewise, of scenes that are unparalleled except by the atrocities of the negroes of St. Domingo.

Is civilization then, as Carlyle intimates, "only a wrappage through which the savage nature of man can still burst, infernal as ever"? And must we, with Carlyle, relegate the Reign of Terror to "the mysteries that men cannot explain"? The Revolution, up to the year '93, is easily explicable it was the retribution visited upon tyranny. The first murders proceeded from a real irritation caused by a sense of danger. But Feudalism and Monarchy were things of the past: the people were sovereign and confidently cried to the world, "We are free; imitate us!" And yet the pen of history has blotted out the word Revolution, and in its place has written Terror. We cannot believe this to be, as in the rebellion of St. Domingo, the mere ebullition of human brutality. The thoughts and sentiments of a people are the powers which determine what a nation shall be and the history which it shall have.

The Reign of Terror was the logical sequence of thought, philosophic thought. Historians have been quick to acknowledge the tremendous influence of the French philosophers on the beginning of the Revolution, but none, so far as I know, have examined the characteristics of the Reign of Terror, showing their origin in French philosophy and their coincidence with its development. Neither historians nor the men themselves were, doubtless, aware of it, but the sinister crowds that surged through the Palais Royal and sat in the benches of the Jacobin Clubmen apparently bereft of reason and devoid of principle ―acted, nevertheless, from principle, principle that became

a kind of religion without faith, God, or immortality, but capable of evoking heroism, fanticism, even martyrdom.

The opening challenge of the new religion was sounded by Helvetius. He taught men that judgment was a sensibility; that self-interest was the basis of justice, and pleasure the rule of self-interest. To be virtuous, therefore, one had only to abandon himself to the drift of appetite. France eagerly accepted a system of ethics whose monstrous paradox made morality consist in immorality. It is not strange, then, that we should discover in France at this time not only unparalleled licentiousness, but an ignorance of the fundamental conceptions of virtue and justice. Law books now are shut, and crime, as crime, goes unpunished. The home is a forgotten superstition; the number of foundlings is doubled; marriage is unknown, except that "republican marriage" in which men and women, with cruel sarcasm, were tied together in death's wedlock and sunk by hundreds beneath the waters of France. Had the inoffensive philosopher who exclaimed, "All becomes legitimate and even virtuous in behalf of the public safety," lived a few years longer, he would have heard the logical echo of his philosophy in the Jacobin motto: "The Republic must march to liberty over corpses."

But we discover, likewise, in this world of Terror, a gross impiety. An encyclopædist, not long before, had refused an article on "God," on the ground that He was no longer of interest to the French nation. It was too true. Religion had vanished in a laugh. The church and its inconsistencies had been covered by Voltaire with merited obloquy. Faith, that would have resisted the sensualism of Helvetius, and the materialism of the encyclopædists, succumbed to the inexpressible ridicule of Voltaire. His influence, like a subtle but beneficent poison, was the source both of life unto life and of death unto death. Look to the frontier! See starving, undisciplined

peasantry, by the force of sheer enthusiasm, beating back the best armies of the world. There is the influence of Voltaire. His ideas of justice, freedom, and humanity did honor to the century in which he lived. But look within; see the churches looted, burned, or made the scene of disgusting orgies; the bells run into cannon; the plate swept into the mint; the priests turned Satyrs. We can behold at Lyons a typical scene: An ass, clothed in priestly vestments, drags the Scriptures through the streets to the grave of Chalier, where the Holy Book is burnt amid the imprecations of the mob, and its dust scattered in derision into the the face of Heaven. There is the influence of Voltaire. While he did not deny the existence of a God, every system of positive belief, everything that claimed sanctity or invoked faith, met with calumny and withering irony, which, with flashes of divine genius, lit up the enshrouding darkness only to leave the world in deeper gloom.

Morality and religion have thus disappeared, but the work of destruction is incomplete. It remained for Holbach to dethrone that last relic of superstition God. If, as Helvetius and Condillac taught, we know nothing except through the senses, then our knowledge is limited to the external and material world; God is unknowable, and nature is the beginning and end. Everything spiritual is a delusion. Immortality is an absurdity. Reason and physical enjoyment constitute the highest end of man, "for, with death, the farce is over." On the day of Corpus Christi, 1792, the world took quiet and devout part in the solemn festival. The day of Corpus Christi, 1793, witnessed the triumph of Holbach. The national convention of France kneel before the high altar of Notre Dame and worship Reason in the person of ruined Virtue. What a splendid exhibition of the power of philosophy to satisfy the soul! Kneel before that shrine, O humble seeker after truth, and while you chant the hymn to Liberty, for

get, if you can, that your goddess of pure reason is a painted harlot.

Hitherto the work of the philosophers had been negative; they hesitated to build where they had destroyed, but with Rousseau there arose a positive system, a system as dangerous as it was fascinating, for it was divorced from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason. He did not hesitate to affirm, and France, his devoted pupil, did not hesitate to believe, that the only perfect form of government was one in which "each one uniting himself with the whole, shall yet obey himself and remain as free as before." The will, he claimed, was free and could not be represented. Law, therefore, was not law unless ratified individually by the people. No one was bound to obey a law to which he had not given consent. It followed, therefore, that we become a law unto ourselves. But, inasmuch as our will is free, and may not be to-morrow what it was to-day, we are not bound to obey to-morrow the law that we approved to-day. But legislation looks to the future, and is, therefore, a palpable absurdity, for no intelligence can anticipate the will of the future. Law must end, therefore, in arbitrary decrees enforced by those that have the power. How remarkably coincident are the facts with the logic. Louis XVI. was executed, but not without a trial. Marie Antoinette was murdered, but not without the semblance of a trial; but as the Terror flings away the last vestige of restraint, the flood of death sweeps over the Gironde and Danton, and finally engulfs the "Mountain" itself by "decree without forms of law."

Morality, religion, God, and Government, all are blotted out. The flood-gates are open. How shall life escape the universal deluge? When is life respected where there is no morality? When is life valued where there is no religion? When is life sacred where there is no God? When is life protected where there is no Government? The forty-four thousand prisons of France fill and empty

to the steady click of the guillotine. Thousands perish. daily on battle-field and scaffolds and no one shudders all act without regret, without remorse. Can it be that this has come from the womb of philosophy? Vultures line the banks of the Rhine and Loire and pick the bones of mother and babe, priest and patriot, statesman and scholar none are spared. Death is poured out in great floods until the insatiable Terror chokes from excess of blood. Is it possible that the quiet students of the eighteenth century could have dreamed of this? Did the Philistine lords dream of the result when they took the blind vengeful Samson from his cell, struck off his fetters and put him within reach of the pillars of the temple?

O philosophers! O men of thought! you were honest; you hoped to free the world, but you sowed the wind; your beloved France reaped the whirlwind, and history has called the ghastly harvest the Reign of Terror !

THE PRINCIPLE OF HARMONY IN NATURE AND HUMANITY.

MACLEAN PRIZE ORATION, BY JAMES M. BALDWIN, '84.

THE worlds are hung on a single thread. If the cord be cut that holds a globe in place, the fatal word is passed through space, and the laws of order yield to the reign of ruin. The bee hums as she flies with her burden from the flower to the hive; the sunset is a great painting, hung in the common palace of mankind; the distant city binds the tramp of a thousand busy feet in a low, sweet murmur, and the trickling brook cuts, with quiet toil, strange forms in the living rock, or wears a polish on the jewel in its bed. In all her forms of expression, Nature has one voice.

Genius is constructive, not creative. Man interprets what he finds, and as his interpretation is true to the