exquisite dish of whipped cream; one swallows down the unsubstantial
trifle, and asks impatiently if that is all? At any rate, it is enough.
Into that frothy sweetness his subtle hand has insinuated a single drop
of some strange liquor--is it a poison or is it an elixir of
life?--whose penetrating influence will spread and spread until the
remotest fibres of the system have felt its power. Contemporary French
readers, when they had shut the book, found somehow that they were
looking out upon a new world; that a process of disintegration had begun
among their most intimate beliefs and feelings; that the whole rigid
frame-work of society--of life itself--the hard, dark, narrow,
antiquated structure of their existence--had suddenly, in the twinkling
of an eye, become a faded, shadowy thing.

It might have been expected that, among the reforms which such a work
would advocate, a prominent place would certainly have been given to
those of a political nature. In England a political revolution had been
crowned with triumph, and all that was best in English life was founded
upon the political institutions which had been then established. The
moral was obvious: one had only to compare the state of England under a
free government with the state of France, disgraced, bankrupt, and
incompetent, under autocratic rule. But the moral is never drawn by
Voltaire. His references to political questions are slight and vague; he
gives a sketch of English history, which reaches Magna Charta, suddenly
mentions Henry VII., and then stops; he has not a word to say upon the
responsibility of Ministers, the independence of the judicature, or even
the freedom of the press. He approves of the English financial system,
whose control by the Commons he mentions, but he fails to indicate the
importance of the fact. As to the underlying principles of the
constitution, the account which he gives of them conveys hardly more to
the reader than the famous lines in the _Henriade_: