In describing the encyclopaedic movement as being, among other things, the development of political interest under the presiding influence of a humanistic philosophy, we are using the name of politics in its widest sense.  The economic conditions of a country, and the administration of its laws, are far more vitally related to its well-being than the form of its government.  The form of government is indeed a question of the first importance, but then this is owing in a paramount degree to the influence which it may have upon the other two sets of elements in the national life.  Form of government is like the fashion of a man’s clothes; it may fret or may comfort him, may be imposing or mean, may react upon his spirits to elate or depress them.  In either case it is less intimately related to his welfare than the state of his blood and tissues.  In saying, then, that the Encyclopaedists began a political work, what is meant is that they drew into the light of new ideas, groups of institutions, usages, and arrangements which affected the real well-being and happiness of France, as closely as nutrition affected the health and strength of an individual Frenchman.  It was the Encyclopaedists who first stirred opinion in France against the iniquities of colonial tyranny and the abominations of the slave trade.  They demonstrated the folly and wastefulness and cruelty of a fiscal system that was eating the life out of the land.  They protested in season and out of season against arrangements which made the administration of justice a matter of sale and purchase.  They lifted up a strong voice against the atrocious barbarities of an antiquated penal code.  It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis XV., nor the churchmen singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society, the honour that is owed to productive industry.  They were vehement for the glories of peace, and passionate against the brazen glories of war.[160]

We are not to suppose that the Encyclopaedia was the originating organ of either new methods or new social ideas.  The exalted and peculiarly modern views about peace, for instance, were plainly inspired from the writings of the Abbe Saint Pierre (1658-1743)—­one of the most original spirits of the century, who deserves to be remembered among other good services as the inventor of the word bienfaisance.  Again, in the mass of the political articles we feel the immense impulse that was given to sociological discussion by the Esprit des Lois.  Few questions are debated here, which Montesquieu had not raised, and none are debated without reference to Montesquieu’s line of argument.  The change of which we are conscious in turning from the Esprit des Lois to the Encyclopaedia is that political ideas have been grasped as instruments.  Philosophy has become patriotism.  The Encyclopaedists advanced with grave solicitude to the consideration of evils, to which the red-heeled parasites of Versailles were insolently and incorrigibly blind.