It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the attention of statesmen.  It is easy to criticise it in the light of subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more suffering than all the wars from that day to this.  For it was based on a perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe.  It assumed that the existing political distribution of power was perfectly satisfactory and conformable to the best interests of all the peoples concerned.  It would have hindered the Partition of Poland, but it would have maintained the Austrian oppression of Italians.  The project also secured to the sovrans the heritage of their authority and guarded against civil wars.  This assumed that the various existing constitutions were fundamentally just.  The realisation of the scheme would have perpetuated all the evils of autocratic governments.  Its author did not perceive that the radical evil in France was irresponsible power.  It needed the reign of Louis xv. and the failure of attempts at reform under his successor to bring this home.  The Abbe even thought that an increase of the despotic authority of the government was desirable, provided this were accompanied by an increase in the enlightenment and virtue of its ministers.

In 1729 he published an abridgment of his scheme, and here he looks beyond its immediate results to its value for distant posterity.  No one, he says, can imagine or foresee the advantages which such an alliance of European states will yield to Europe five hundred years after its establishment.  Now we can see the first beginnings, but it is beyond the powers of the human mind to discern its infinite effects in the future.  It may produce results more precious than anything hitherto experienced by man.  He supports his argument by observing that our primitive ancestors could not foresee the improvements which the course of ages would bring in their rudimentary arrangements for securing social order.

3.

It is characteristic that the Abbe de Saint-Pierre’s ideas about Progress were a by-product of his particular schemes.  In 1773 he published a Project to Perfect the Government of States, and here he sketched his view of the progressive course of civilisation.  The old legend of the golden age, when men were perfectly happy, succeeded by the ages of silver, bronze, and iron, exactly reverses the truth of history.  The age of iron came first, the infancy of society, when men were poor and ignorant of the arts; it is the present condition of the savages of Africa and America.  The age of bronze ensued, in which there was more security, better laws, and the invention of the most necessary arts began.  There followed the age of silver, and Europe has not yet emerged from it.  Our reason has indeed reached the point of considering how war may be abolished, and is thus approaching the golden age of the future; but the art of government and the general regulation of society, notwithstanding all the improvements of the past, is still in its infancy.  Yet all that is needed is a short series of wise reigns in our European states to reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise on earth.