acted in this way: all Christian Churches, faithful to the same principle, vied with one another in the invention of new sufferings in order to correct those stuck fast in "vice." Even now, nine people out of ten believe still that natural occurrences, such as droughts, earthquakes, and contagious diseases, are sent from on high by some kind of divinity to bring back sinning humanity to the right path.
At the same time, the State in its schools and universities maintained, and continues to maintain, the same faith in the natural perversity of man. Its teachers and professors everywhere teach the necessity of having a power above man, and of implanting a moral clement in society by means of punishments, inflicted for violation of "moral law," which by some cunning they identify with written law. To convince men that this authority is necessary is a question of life and death for the State; because, if men began to doubt the necessity of strengthening moral principles by the strong hand of authority, they would soon lose their faith in the high mission of their rulers.
In this manner all our religious, historical, juridical, and social education is imbued with the idea that human beings, if left to themselves, would revert to savagery; that without authority men would eat one another; for nothing, they say, can be expected of the "multitude" but brutishness and the warring of each against all. Men would perish if above them soared not the elect: the priest and the judge, with their two helpmates—the policeman and the hangman. These saviours prevent, we are told, the battle of all against all; they inculcate respect of law, they teach discipline, and lead men with a high hand, till nobler conceptions shall have developed in their "hardened hearts," so that the whip, the prison, and the scaffold may be less necessary than they are to-day.
We laugh at one of those kings who, having been driven away in 1848, said on leaving: "My poor subjects! without me they will perish!" We mock at the English tradesman who is persuaded that his compatriots descend from the lost tribe of Israel, and therefore it is their destiny to impose good government on "inferior races."
But do we not find in all nations this same exaggerated self-appreciation amongst most of those who have learned something?
And yet a scientific study of the development of societies and institutions brings us to quite different views. It proves that
