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SUMMARY.
CHAPTER I.
THE REVOLUTIONARY DOGMA.
PAGE
The French Revolution of 1789-the Revolution of these
latter days
1
Importance of understanding it aright
2
To obtain the instruction which is the true end of his-
torical research, we must discern the ideas of which
events are the phenomenal expression
3
The public order which the Revolution destroyed, rested on the idea of divinely prescribed duty
The Revolutionists attempted to rebuild it on the idea of
political rights, attaching to man quà man
9
Their method social geometry
10
They applied this method to the speculations of Rousseau,
and endeavoured to translate into institutions his
Contrat Social .
11
These speculations postulate that men are absolutely
equivalent, and that the will of the majority is the
source and norm of all rights .
13
Substance of the Revolutionary dogma: that complete
freedom, or rather lawlessness, is the natural condition
of man; that all men are born and continue equal in
rights; that civil society is an artificial state resting
upon a contract between those sovereign units,
whereby the native independence of each is sur-
rendered, and an absolute power over each is vested
in the body politic; that human nature is good, and
that the evil in the world is the result of bad educa-
tion and bad institutions; that man, uncorrupted by
civilisation, is essentially reasonable; and that the
will of the sovereign units, dwelling in any territory
under the social contract, that is of the majority of
them, expressed by their delegates, is the supreme
law
Object of the present treatise: to examine the Revolu-
tion, after a century's experience of it, in its
relation with Liberty, Religion, Science, Art, De-
mocracy, and in its bearing on the public life of
England
15
16
CHAPTER II.
THE REVOLUTION AND LIBERTY.
The Revolutionary dogma holds liberty to reside in
political equality
17
A worthier conception of liberty will be set forth.
Liberty is rooted in free will
18
Free will, concentrated in itself, is moral liberty, and is,
in a sense, unlimited
But as soon as it manifests itself externally it becomes
And law, which is grounded in the self-same faculty of
reason whence springs free agency, is the essential
condition of its right use
19
Hence the necessity which compels men into the social
state wherein liberty is realised
This truth was recognised by Aristotle and embodied in
his Politics; he holds that man is a moral being and
that only in a polity can justice be realised; that the
state is an association of free persons, to be organised
justly, and that its end is the higher life
21
The statement of M. Fustel de Coulanges, that individual
liberty was unknown in the ancient Hellenic republics,
examined and dissented from .
23
Those republics were the first missionaries of freedom in
the Western world
25
The political progress of Europe is the gradual vindication
of the personal, social, and public prerogatives which
make up individual freedom; the evolution of the
individual in the social organism
26
The chief factors in this evolution were Roman juris-
prudence, the Stoic philosophy, the Christian religion,
and the traditions of the Teutonic tribes
Of these Christianity is the chief, for it vindicated liberty
of conscience
The conception of freedom, as spiritual and ethical, the
source of the great growth of individuality in the
Middle Ages
The constitutional history of England is the history of
the development, by a process of organic growth,
upon the one hand, of that individual freedom which
means complexity, differentiation, inequality; and
upon the other hand, of that closer unity resulting
from the harmonious working of diverse forces, freely
constituted, under the sway of great religious and
ethical principles
England retained the free institutions of the Middle Ages
which, in most Continental countries, were sapped by
Renaissance Absolutism and gradually disappeared
Since the great event of 1688, finally vindicated for us
"the undoubted rights and liberties of the subject,"
English freedom has "broadened down," until we now
enjoy the plenitude of all the liberties which the
exercise of personality implies
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28
31
32
33
34
Liberty is rooted and grounded in inequality
35