had
become so incrusted as to be wholly incompetent to guide society,
because it was equally repugnant to the intellectual perceptions and the
moral sense, the knowledge and the feelings, of the best and most
active-minded persons of the time. The same sort of consideration
explains and vindicates the enormous power of Voltaire. France had
outgrown the system that had brought her through the Middle Ages. The
further development of her national life was fatally hindered by the
tight bonds of an old order, which clung with the hardy tenacity of a
thriving parasite, diverting from the roots all their sustenance, eating
into the tissue, and feeding on the juices of the living tree. The
picture has often been painted, and we need not try to paint it once
more in detail here. The whole power and ordering of the nation were
with the sworn and chartered foes of light, who had every interest that
a desire to cling to authority and wealth can give in keeping the
understanding subject.

The glories of the age of Louis XIV were the climax of a set of ideas
that instantly afterward lost alike their grace, their usefulness, and
the firmness of their hold on the intelligence of men. A dignified and
venerable hierarchy, an august and powerful monarch, a court of gay and
luxurious nobles, all lost their grace because the eyes of men were
suddenly caught and appalled by the awful phantom, which was yet so
real, of a perishing nation. Turn from Bossuet's orations to
Boisguillebert's _Detail de la France_; from the pulpit rhetorician's
courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the
misery of the common people;[31] from Corneille and Racine to La
Bruyere's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered
over the fields, black, livid, all burned by the sun, bound to the earth
that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort
of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human
face, and, in fact, are men." The contrast had existed for generations.
The material misery caused by the wars of the great Louis deepened the
dark side, and the lustre of genius consecrated to the glorification of
traditional authority and the order of the hour heightened the
brightness of the bright side, until the old contrast was suddenly seen
by a few startled eyes, and the new and deepest problem, destined to
strain our civilization to a degree that not many have even now
conceived, c