men's minds, when Church and
State withdrew from the center of social life to its circumference.
What remained when the keystone of the arch was removed, was private
rights and private interests, the materials of a society rather {13}
than a society itself. These rights and interests were the natural
order which had been distorted by the ambitions of kings and priests,
and which emerged when the artificial super-structure disappeared,
because they were the creation, not of man, but of Nature herself.
They had been regarded in the past as relative to some public end,
whether religion or national welfare. Henceforward they were thought
to be absolute and indefeasible, and to stand by their own virtue.
They were the ultimate political and social reality; and since they
were the ultimate reality, they were not subordinate to other aspects
of society, but other aspects of society were subordinate to them.

The State could not encroach upon these rights, for the State existed
for their maintenance. They determined the relation of classes, for
the most obvious and fundamental of all rights was property--property
absolute and unconditioned--and those who possessed it were regarded as
the natural governors of those who did not. Society arose from their
exercise, through the contracts of individual with individual. It
fulfilled its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom,
it secured full scope for their unfettered exercise. It failed in so
far as, like the French monarchy, it overrode them by the use of an
arbitrary authority. Thus conceived, society assumed something of the
appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and
the receipt of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the
most numerous shares. The currents of social activity did not converge
upon common ends, but were dispersed through a multitude of channels,
{14} created by the private interests of the individuals who composed
society. But in their very variety and spontaneity, in the very
absence of any attempt to relate them to a larger purpose than that of
the individual, lay the best security of its attainment. There is a
mysticism of reason as well as of emotion, and the eighteenth century
found, in the beneficence of natural instincts, a substitute for the
God whom it had expelled from contact with society, and did not
hesitate to identify them.

"Thus God and nature planned the general frame
And bad