gentle and altruistic sentiments.
The business of politics is to destroy the opposition between
self-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a man
seeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. A
great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of
the inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France while
Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been
ruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an
abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women
but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will
end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a
perpetual confederation of mankind.

It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faith
in the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy,
and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvetius and
Holbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which made
for itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking of
men than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn to
choose of two alternative views the one which would favour this
sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which
governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion,"
for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to
science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political
institutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is
institutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from
reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and
destruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, the
unchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvetius)
that human nature is itself the product of "education" or, as we should
call it, "environment." Circumstances and above all political
institutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, are
gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character
of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutions
and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the
improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of
prejudice and despotism.

Wordsworth's "shades of the prison-house" which close upon the growing
boy, were a