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Stars and "Georges" were snipped off ambassadors and peers as they entered St. James's Palace. It is superfluous to multiply illustrations. Enough has been said to show that the circumscription of aristocratic privilege and the diffusion of material luxury did not precipitate the millennium. Social Equalization was not synonymous with Social Amelioration.
Not only had the Regent given shelter to the exiled Protestants and looked on at the diffusion of the new doctrines, but her "fair words" had raised hopes that the government itself would join the ranks of the reformers. Mary of Guise had regarded the religious movement in a purely political light.
Far from favouring the diffusion of democratic ideas, the projects of reform of the theorists of this period merely impeded their progress. Communistic Socialism, which several of them professed would restore the Revolution, finally alarmed the bourgeoisie and even the working-classes.
But, for the sake of argument, let us suppose that the unequal diffusion of religious knowledge has proceeded directly from the agency of God. Still the objection against his goodness, in regard to the dispensation of light, would be no greater than in relation to all the dispensations of his favour.
Left in affluent circumstances at the death of his father, which had taken place while he was yet a child, there was little necessity for exertion; but of an active and energetic disposition, he could not remain comparatively unemployed; and obtaining a situation in one of the principal banks in the city, he devoted the income, acquired by it, to aid in the diffusion of useful knowledge among his fellow-townsmen, and for the alleviation of the wants of the helpless and distressed, for never did the needy apply to him in vain.
Nor did these benefactors fail to mention the cases of ancient slaves, who, having the advantages of education, became poets, teachers, and philosophers, instrumental in the diffusion of knowledge among the higher classes.
This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life and death. Claude Bernard says, Rien ne nait, rien ne se cree, tout se continue.
What we want is so wide a diffusion of scientific ideas that there shall be a class of men engaged in studying economic problems for their own sake, and an intelligent public able to judge what they are doing. There must be an improvement in the objects at which they aim in education, and it is now worth while to inquire what that improvement is.
Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.
With respect to distinct species of the same genus inhabiting very distant and isolated regions, as the process of modification has necessarily been slow, all the means of migration will have been possible during a very long period; and consequently the difficulty of the wide diffusion of species of the same genus is in some degree lessened.
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