11.]

REAL FREEDOM.

37

We may say then, as the result of our argument, that Liberty, considered as a fact in the world's history, and the most considerable of facts, is, if we contemplate it in itself, in its nature, freedom from constraint in the action of our faculties; that, considered in its end, it is the exercise of personality; that its indispensable condition is a certain stage of intellectual and spiritual development call it, if you like, civilisation, so long as you mean by the word something more than material progress - in which a man shall be capable of tending consciously towards the realisation of personality; and that the law of its tendency is moral. "When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom," the late Professor Green has well observed, "we measure it by the increasing development and exercise, on the whole, of those powers of contributing to social good, with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the[ir] greater power ... as a body, to make the most and best of themselves. Freedom, in all the forms of doing what one will with one's own, is valuable only as a means to an end. That end is what I call freedom in the positive sense in other words, the liberation of the powers of all men, equally, for contributions to a common good." *

This is real freedom. This is the only liberty * Works, vol. iii. pp. 371-2. The italics are mine.

worthy of that august name. This rational liberty all social institutions and political machinery should subserve; and they are of value only in proportion as they do subserve it. How far has the Revolution vindicated such liberty? Its achievements may be divided into two classes: the destructive and the constructive. Certainly its power for destruction is without parallel in the world's history. It has gone as near as possible to the effacement of the France which existed before 1789. I say "as near as possible." For the past is really indestructible. You do not destroy it by destroying its symbols. "Far off, yet ever nigh," it lives in the present, in a thousand ways, and most notably in national character in those instincts, aptitudes, passions, which heredity transmits in such ample measure. Each infant born into France to-day, unquestionably bears imprinted on its brain many of the intellectual dispositions, of the spiritual qualities, of the physical habits, of its parents, of its remote ancestors, of the whole race. It was no effervescence of rhetoric, but a simple statement of fact, when the French philosopher wrote, 66 nous sommes non

seulement les fils de la postérité, de ceux qui ont déjà vécu, mais au fond et réellement ces générations antérieures elles-mêmes." The Revolutionary legislators could not " unget " themselves

if I may borrow a phrase from Sir Anthony Absolute; they could not rid themselves of those things past of which they were made and moulded.

11.]

THE CONQUESTS OF 1789.

39

But of the public institutions of their country which they found existing, hardly any escaped their rage for indiscriminate destruction. What is the gain to freedom? It may be easily summed up. The arbitrary power of the monarch has passed away. The outworn machinery of government, "an expensive anarchy," D'Argenson called it, has disappeared. The oppressive and irrational privileges of the aristocratic caste-privileges which, long divorced from duties, were justly and passionately hated by the great mass of Frenchmen— are gone for ever; the roturier is free from "his birth's invidious bar": "la carrière est ouverte aux talens." The guilds and companies which, if they, in some sort, protected the individual artisan, also hampered him by antiquated restrictions, have ceased to exist. The peasant, too, like the skilled labourer, is lord of himself; he may do as he likes, so far as his fellow-men are concerned, and pursue his own good, or what he accounts such, in his own way. Add to this, that religious intolerance and religious persecution—the same can hardly be said of irreligious-have vanished, together with the iniquities and cruelties of the old penal laws and the old criminal procedure, and you have a tolerably complete account of "the conquests of 1789." And what the Revolution did in these respects for France, primarily and most largely, it has done, in greater or less measure, for much of Continental Europe. The march of Napoleon,

though devastating as Attila's, from Madrid to Moscow, had in it something electric: it brought down in a common ruin the feudal or despotic polities, founded on a fictitious "right divine of kings to govern wrong," and associated everywhere with a legalised inequality which did not correspond with the nature of things. It shook, so to speak, the idea of freedom into the air.

But must we not say that in the air that idea remains, for the most part? Where has the Revolution constructed anything stable? Where has it achieved, practically achieved, liberty in the higher and positive sense? Take France, where it has had its most perfect work. M. Prévost-Paradol once apologetically said that if the Revolution had failed to found a government in France, it had, at all events, founded a society. "A society!" One thinks of Mr. Carlyle's words: "We call it a Society and go about professing openly the totallest separation, isolation." In the name of a spurious equality" hate striving to pass itself off as love," Amiel well called it-France has been converted into a chaos of hostile individuals. To constitute a nation there is need of common traditions, common feelings, common modes and ends of action. In the place of these we find complete dissolution of the bonds of thought, the unappeasable rancour of factions, or rather sects, the irreconcilable antagonism of classes: "Immortale odium et nunquam sanabile vulnus."

"But the masses of the French

11.] IDYLLIC VIEWS OF THE FRENCH PEASANT. 41

population,' "it is sometimes said, "the toiling masses! Who can deny how much the Revolution has done for their enfranchisement, their elevation?" Let us consider it. Of the ten or eleven millions of adult Frenchmen, some five millions are peasant-proprietors. Can we predicate liberty of these? Can we even predicate of them personality, except in the most elementary sense? Let us on this subject hear M. Vacherot, one of the chief apostles and confessors of the Revolutionary dogma. He warns us, "Il faut prendre garde aux idylles sur le bien-être, l'indépendance, la moralité, du paysan. La vérité est, qu'il vit misérablement, qu'il est abruti et mécon

tent.

Et cet état de choses ira en empirant."* This state of things has gone on getting worse since M. Vacherot wrote these words a quarter of a century ago. If any one desires to know the truth regarding it, let him gird himself up to read M. Zola's La Terre, the vilest and the most "realistic" of that master's productions. He will not be amused; the book is deadly dull. But he will find a gallery of photographs, a collection of "documents" (to use the author's phrase), the substantial accuracy of which appears to be quite beyond serious question. The French peasant will stand revealed in all the repulsiveness of actual life; consumed with "the furious passion for possessing land"; avaricious, penurious, dishonest, * La Démocratie, p. 209, 2nd edition.