at spectacle
of our Revolution, you now see with joy the termination of its last act;
you will see with rapture this new era, so long promised to the French
people, at last open, in which all the benefits of nature, all the
creations of genius, all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will
be utilised, an era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your
philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised."

It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the eighteenth to
the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most important of those
thinkers who, living into the new period, took care that the ideas of
their own generation should not be overwhelmed in the rising flood of
reaction.

CHAPTER XII. THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND

1.

The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and
England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century,
they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the
leading feature of the international history of the whole century.
But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or
more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was
a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of
civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the
intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that
appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the
French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in
Paris, were printed in London.

It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the same
kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as in
France. England had her revolution behind her, France had hers
before her. England enjoyed what were then considered large political
liberties, the envy of other lands; France groaned under the tyranny of
worthless rulers. The English constitution satisfied the nation, and
the serious abuses which would now appear to us intolerable were not
sufficient to awaken a passionate desire for reforms. The general
tendency of British thought was to see salvation in the stability
of existing institutions, and to regard change with suspicion. Now
passionate desire for reform was the animating force which propagated
the idea of Progress in France. And when this idea is translated from
the atmosphere of combat, in which it was developed by French men
of letters, into the