the progress of cultivation, from the present moment to the time
when the whole earth was become like a garden, the distress for
want of food would be constantly pressing on all mankind, if they
were equal. Though the produce of the earth might be increasing
every year, population would be increasing much faster, and the
redundancy must necessarily be repressed by the periodical or
constant action of misery or vice.

Mr Condorcet's Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres
de l'Esprit Humain, was written, it is said, under the pressure
of that cruel proscription which terminated in his death. If he
had no hopes of its being seen during his life and of its
interesting France in his favour, it is a singular instance of
the attachment of a man to principles, which every day's
experience was so fatally for himself contradicting. To see the
human mind in one of the most enlightened nations of the world,
and after a lapse of some thousand years, debased by such a
fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice,
revenge, ambition, madness, and folly as would have disgraced the
most savage nation in the most barbarous age must have been such
a tremendous shock to his ideas of the necessary and inevitable
progress of the human mind that nothing but the firmest
conviction of the truth of his principles, in spite of all
appearances, could have withstood.

This posthumous publication is only a sketch of a much larger
work, which he proposed should be executed. It necessarily,
therefore, wants that detail and application which can alone
prove the truth of any theory. A few observations will be
sufficient to shew how completely the theory is contradicted when