No people, it is said, have done better than the English. But, even if
this is true, does it mean that at the end of the eighteenth century the
products of the political art should be what they were at the end of the
seventeenth century? Just as the English did not fall below the level of enlightenment
of their age, so we should not fall below the level of our
own. Above all, we should not be discouraged by finding nothing in history
that seems to fit our own position. The true science of the state of
society is not all that old. For a long time men built huts before they were
able to build palaces. This is why social architecture, the most important
art of all, has been even slower to progress. It is not the sort of thing that
despots and aristocrats could have been expected to encourage.