neglected: that of Manners. By patience and perseverance I might
produce for France in the nineteenth century the book which we must
all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have
not bequeathed to us; that history of their social life which,
prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil patiently and steadily tried
to write for the Middle Ages, but in an unattractive form.

This work, so far, was nothing. By adhering to the strict lines of a
reproduction a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or
less successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the
dramas of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a
cataloguer of professions, a registrar of good and evil; but to
deserve the praise of which every artist must be ambitious, must I not
also investigate the reasons or the cause of these social effects,
detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions,
and incidents? And finally, having sought--I will not say having found
--this reason, this motive power, must I not reflect on first
principles, and discover in what particulars societies approach or
deviate from the eternal law of truth and beauty? In spite of the wide
scope of the preliminaries, which might of themselves constitute a
book, the work, to be complete, would need a conclusion. Thus
depicted, society ought to bear in itself the reason of its working.

The law of the writer, in virtue of which he is a writer, and which I
do not hesitate to say makes him the equal, or perhaps the superior,
of the statesman, is his judgment, whatever it may be, on human
affairs, and his absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, _are_ the science which
statesmen apply. "A writer ought to have settled opinions on morals
and politics; he should regard himself as a tutor of men; for men need