4.

This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions—­whether combined or not with a belief in the natural equality of men’s faculties—­laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised.  It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.

It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may appear irreclaimably barbarous—­thus potentially including all humanity in the prospect of the future.  Turgot had already conceived “the total mass of the human race moving always slowly forward”; he had declared that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their circumstances.  This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.

Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the eighteenth century.  Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the society of Rome.  But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbe Raynal’s History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772.  It is however, one of the remarkable books of the century.  Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery.  But it was also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system.  The author’s method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon employed on a larger scale.  A history of facts was a more formidable indictment than any declamatory attack.

Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian conquerors and their priests.  He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher of Progress.  He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society.  But he observes that “the human race is what we wish to make it,” that the felicity of man depends entirely on the improvement of legislation; and in the survey of the history of Europe to which the last Book of his work is devoted, his view is generally optimistic. [Footnote:  cp.  Raynal, Histoire, vii. 214, 256.  This book was first published anonymously; the author’s name appeared in the edition of 1780.]