prisons, and the executioner.  But below these are ten thousand who have a liability in excess of all restraining influences whatsoever; and the result of this liability, in accordance with the law of probability already mentioned, is two hundred murders in a year.[B] Now here the action of fate does not begin until you reach the lowest ten thousand.  Even here, freedom is not extinguished; the rational and moral elements that confer it are weak, but they are not necessarily dead or inoperative; for, in conjunction with lower restraints, they actually make the number of crimes not ten thousand, but two hundred.  True it is, that these are partially enslaved, partially subject to fate; but they are enslaved not by any inscrutable law of society, comparable with “that which preserves the balance of the sexes”; they are “taken captive by their own lusts,” as one of our philosopher’s “ignorant men” said many years ago.  But above these the enslaving liability begins to disappear, and freedom soon becomes, so far as this test applies, supreme.

[Footnote B:  It may be said that this is a mere arguing by supposition.  But the supposition here has respect only to the numbers.]

Thus for one year we apply a measure of the liability to crime, and obtain a result which is inexpressibly far from sustaining Mr. Buckle’s inference; since it shows that the fatal force is to all freeing forces as two hundred to thirty millions,—­and shows, moreover, that this fate, instead of inclosing in its toils every man in the nation, and utterly depriving all of freedom, actually touches at all but a small number, and only diminishes, not destroys, the freedom of these.  Next year we apply the same measure to nearly the same persons, in the presence of nearly the same restraints; and find, of course, the result to be nearly the same.  But this result no more proves universal enslavement in the second year than it did in the first.  And so of the third, fourth, or fortieth application of the measure.

But a portion of these murderers are yearly withdrawn:  ought not the number of crimes to diminish?  It would do so, but for that law of social propagation which is ever and everywhere active.  But this law, which connects men and generations, and tends to make history a unit, is not a part of fate alone; it carries just so much fate and so much freedom as there are to be carried.  It changes nothing; it is simply a vehicle, and transports freight,—­precious stones or ballast stones, as the case may be.  Therefore, in unveiling a single year, and seeing precisely what this fact of two hundred murders means, we find its meaning for any possible succession of years.  It shows certain measures of fate working in the bosoms of certain numbers of men; but that there is a fate inhabiting society as such, and holding every man and woman in its unfeeling hand, must be proven, if at all, by other facts than these.