ntioned man asks what will become of their posterity, they
reply 'Then, as now!' _But it may happen to these persons themselves to
have to endure those evils which they believe are reserved for others._
If this epidemical and intellectual disorder could be corrected, _whose
bad effects are already visible_, those evils might still be prevented;
but if it proceeds in its growth, _Providence will correct man by the
very revolution which must spring from it_. Whatever may happen indeed,
all must turn out as usual for the best in general, at the end of the
account, although _this cannot happen without the punishment of those
who contribute even to general good by their evil actions_." The most
superficial reader will hardly require a commentary on this very
remarkable passage; he must instantly perceive how Leibnitz, in the
seventeenth century, foresaw what has occurred in the eighteenth; and
the prediction has been verified in the history of the actors in the
late revolution, while the result, which we have not perhaps yet had,
according to Leibnitz's own exhilarating system of optimism, is an
eduction of good from evil.

A great genius, who was oppressed by malignant rivals in his own times,
has been noticed by Madame de Stael, as having left behind him an actual
prophecy of the French Revolution: this was Guibert, who, in his
Commentary on Folard's Polybius, published in 1727, declared that "a
conspiracy is actually forming in Europe, by means at once so subtle and
efficacious, that I am sorry not to have come into the world _thirty
years later_ to witness its result. It must be confessed that the
sovereigns of Europe wear very bad spectacles. The proofs of it are
mathematical, if such proofs ever were, of a conspiracy." Guibert
unquestionably foresaw the anti-monarchical spirit gathering up its
mighty wings, and rising over the universe! but could not judge of the
nature of the impulse which he predicted; prophesying from the ideas in
his luminous intellect, he seems to have been far more curious about,
than certain of, the consequences. Rousseau even circumstantially
predicted the convulsions of modern Europe. He stood on the crisis of
the French Revolution, which he vividly foresaw, for he seriously
advised the higher classes of society to have their children taught some
useful trade; a notion highly ridiculed on the first appearance of the
Emile: but at its hour the awful truth struck! He, too, foresaw the
horrors of