history of the human mind is the history of human folly,' as says M. Voltaire. . . . Neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France." In another letter of the same period and similar provocation: "However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of God, I have my doubts."
In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly, against modern "Christian" civilization. In religion, we have substituted for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological considerations, we act no longer with discrimination but upon a principle of universal sympathy. In the field of art and literature, we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful, in favor of universal puffery. In politics we have nullified intelligence and renounced leadership, to embrace universal suffrage, which is the last disgrace of the human spirit.
It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern society possesses the characteristics
