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Some few there were whose minds consciously perceived the change in conditions, formed new concepts, and sought to transmit those concepts. But this effort was on the one hand too limited in range, and on the other too vague and varied in form, to really bring about the change, or wisely guide it. The action of the cruel facts on a no longer normal social relation, resulted in a vast reaction, quite uncontrollable by the newer ideals.

The endeavour to reconstruct society on the theory of the “social contract,” or any other then advanced, naturally failed, as the endeavour to maintain an outworn system failed, and the carnage and confusion, the partial reaction to the old basis, the slow, irregular, fumbling progress toward a better state were the results, as we have seen. That conduct which led to the improvement of the social system in France was resultant from conditions and not from concepts.

In our own recent experience with the system of human slavery we have another marked instance, both in the irresistible trend of progressive conditions which brought the change and in the splendid effort to alter those governing concepts on which the system rested in the minds of men. In the abolition movement we have the conscious human effort to alter conscious conduct. The physical extension of our national boundaries and the mechanical extension of economic processes was the unconscious pressure of conditions which also modified conduct. And against both stood the vast weight of brain inertia, and the unending array of false concepts, dating back to the historic period when slavery was a useful relation, and buttressing itself with the crudest quotations from ancient religions.