way in which they were applied, the rigorous deductions drawn from them, the removal of the resisting medium which the compact structure of medieval society had provided. Thus taken they were at once profoundly false and profoundly mischievous. 'I do not enter into those metaphysical distinctions,' said Burke in another context. I hate the very sound of them. This is 'the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the 'affairs of man: does it suit his nature in general? does it suit 'his nature as modified by his habits?'

Sound sense and sound philosophy. Yet this is far from being an exhaustive account of the matter. As there are truths which obscure so there are errors which elicit truth. Not to see the wood for the trees is a common enough form of defective vision: the passage per errorem ad veritatem is no new thing in the history of mind. This is why there are few great teachers who have not used paradox as a means of conveying instruction. Men are lethargic and need to be shaken out of their mental and moral torpor : paradox rouses, startles, perplexes -last of all attracts. For the moment it is unreasonable either to look for balance of judgement or to complain of its absence; as well complain because the circle is not square. The time of figs is not yet. The burden of the past is so heavy that the generation which after long and painful effort has succeeded in emancipating itself is not in a position to do justice to the best side of the system under which it suffered; the wound is raw. Voltaire was blind to the deeper things of Catholicism. So too Moses was no unbiassed judge of Egyptian civilisation, St. Paul of Judaism, Luther of the medieval Church. The swing of the pendulum follows. The true idea underlying the paradox is retained, the exaggeration of its expression forgotten: thus the world of thought and action advances. It was so here. The Social Contract was a fiction: it is not in virtue of contract that society comes into being or subsists. Men are not born free, equal, or brothers; the sovereignty of the people and the rights of man are not primitive facts but products of late reflection; progress is an elaborate and, some-we are not of their number -would have it, an uncertain calculation; the perfectibility of the species, the ever receding shore of a limitless sea. But these beliefs set before men's eyes the ends for which society exists with a vividness of which the grey theories of philosophy were incapable; they came to send fire upon the earth. Are we not the better for its kindling? There are illusions, if indeed they are illusions, and not rather forecasts, under which it is good to labour and from which it is dangerous to be freed.

If we believe that there is no evil without a remedy we shall at least not acquiesce in preventible evils; if we are convinced that the course of the world makes for good, that reason is to be trusted, that the goal of the human race is attainable and is in fact in process of being attained, we can take the open road and advance fearlessly; the night, with the shapes of darkness that haunt it-doubt, despondency, pessimism -is gone. The realisation of the idea is another matter: here the nature of the medium, its power of resistance, the distinction between pure and applied science, must be borne in mind. It was because the Revolution lost sight of such considerations as these that Burke execrated it. But there are inspired follies; and it is better to be a fool than to be dead.' It is not for us, who have entered into its fruits, to repudiate the generous paradox of the Age of Reason; called, like the prophet, to curse it, the word of blessing rises even to reluctant lips. We look back to it, indeed, with the regretful longing with which the grown man looks back to the dreams of his vanished youth. Unrealised, perhaps in their first form incapable of realisation, they stand on a loftier plane than the lowered aspirations and dusty levels of later years. They are the symbol of an inextinguishable hope and of a faith that has moved and will again move mountains.

'Our provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and at last are shovelled silently back under the ground-our acquiescence can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction that this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and immeasurable geologic periods of time for its high and beneficent consummation. As against the ignoble host who think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want of order, that makes the present endurable and makes any tenacious effort to raise the future possible.' *

If the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason the nineteenth was that of at least apparent reaction. The cant, political and religious, of this reaction is as worthless as most other cants.

*Rousseau, i. 179.

Jacobinism has no monopoly of either folly or savagery; religion in every age has suffered less from its enemies than from its friends.

'The massacres of September and the Revolutionary tribunal wrought less bloodshed in twenty-three months than the French Catholics had done in about as many days,' says Lord Acton, speaking of the St. Bartholomew massacre. The clergy applauded. ... After the energetic approval given by the Court of Rome it was not quite easy for a priest to express dissent.' *

When all has been said the Revolution marks an immense step in human progress: and it is not very profitable to ask whether this advance might have been made as effectually and with fewer drawbacks had its men and measures been other than they were. The 'might-have-beens' of history are for the most part waste land, outside the margin of cultivation. Moderate men supply light, not driving power. For this we must go to enthusiasts; the fire of enthusiasm produces motion as well as light. Burke would in all probability have been as ineffectual a reformer in the State as Erasmus in the Church. Both saw too clearly the magnitude of the task and the difficulties that beset it; the Luthers, the Garibaldis, the men of the Mountain have their place in the scheme of things. Nor need we regret that the end of the old world should have come sooner rather than later; the evils which attend the lingering decay of a corrupt society are more grievous than those brought about by its fall. Fieri non debuit, factum valet, must be our verdict on much of the content of history; what is done is done. But it was impossible to maintain the high pressure at which the preceding age had been living. Everywhere there was a distrust of ideas, an impatience of discussion, an unwillingness to enter upon political or social change. The old dynasties were reestablished, partly by force, partly by the assent of indifference; the Revolution was an interlude; 'absolument tuer l'esprit du 'dix-huitième siècle' was the avowed aim. Had this spirit been really assimilated by Europe, or even by France, such an aim would have lain outside the range of practical politics. What made it seem-it never did more than seem-possible was that theory had outstripped fact, the idea lost sight of the concrete humanity in which, if at all, it had to take shape. Hence its failure either to realise itself or to leaven average opinion. The average man had never made the principles of '89 his own. He had been carried away by the current, and

* Lectures on Modern History, p. 163.

when it subsided he returned to his normal standpoint. This standpoint, however-and here was the essential feature of the situation to which the Legitimist and Ultramontane faction was blind-was not that of the preceding generation; this, with its ideas, its methods, its standards, had gone beyond recall. It was because the restored rulers could not or would not face this fact that they came to such speedy shipwreck: from the first the reconstruction was artificial; to those who looked below the surface it was clear that it had not come to stay. The fire that leaped to flame in 1848 was never wholly extinguished; under the superimposed absolutism, of which Metternich was the personification, the imprisoned giant stirred. Vain was the effort to restrain him; the fetters that can bind spirit have yet to be forged. What is called reaction is, if we look at it closely, no more than the passing back-eddy of an advancing tide. Society is a process, a becoming; the forces that guide its developement know neither cessation nor sleep. Their activity is now more, now less perceptible; a period of exceptional energy is followed by one of comparative repose. But this repose is comparative only. The movement escapes our observation, but it is continuous; that which we observe moves on, and we who observe are borne along in the movement. It was so in the Europe of the Restoration. Below the surface water of official conservatism the undercurrent set towards the open sea.

The reformers of the nineteenth century worked on other lines than those of the eighteenth; their aims were more concrete, their purpose was narrowed down to more definite issues. The grosser abuses of the old régime had disappeared; in the Continental States the administration was in the hands of a bureaucracy of the Josephite or Napoleonic type, which, if repressive and centralised, was for the most part painstaking and upright. Industry was encouraged; a sounder finance had been inaugurated; where no political issue was involved the law courts were to be trusted; the Governments, except in Central and Southern Italy, though neither representative nor constitutional, were well-meaning and, according to their lights, just. What was overlooked was that material well-being, important as it is as a condition of welfare, is a means to an end. The life that expresses and is the outcome of national intelligence and will was wanting; this stood aloof, or was diverted into other channels. The more active spirits devoted themselves to the propagation and realisation of ideas in advance of and often in acute conflict with the established order; the vision of national and economical independence took shape and form. The first transformed Italy and Germany from geographical expressions

into nations, and so remade the map of Europe; the second created that socialism which, however impracticable as a system, as a tendency is revolutionising the mind and sentiment of our time. Each of these movements made for human unity. The first, if an apparent, is but an apparent exception; the recognition of the unity of the nation is a step towards the recognition of the unity of mankind. A vague cosmopolitanism is to be distrusted; a beginning must be made with what is nearest to us; the narrower precedes the higher generalisation. Free Trade, improved means of communication, the internationalism of science, art, and literature all point in the same direction. The goal was that of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, but it was pursued with fuller knowledge; the intermediate steps were not slurred but taken each in its order, with the result that the advance made is permanent, there can be no going back on the positions gained.

Il

The unitive tendency of the social movement is even more obvious than that of the nationalist. It is ungracious and may seem presumptuous to criticise the moral standards and achievements of Christendom. Knowledge increases from generation to generation; here the ancients were as children, we are as men. But in the province of conduct surely this is not so. The old world stood nearer to the source. A Paul, a Francis of Assisi, a Xavier-are they not beyond and above our judgement, models for our imitation, not objects of our little praise and blame? This attitude of reverence befits both the worshipped and the worshipper. On raconte qu'Angelico de Fiesole ne 'peignait qu'à genoux les têtes de la Vierge et du Christ. 'serait bien que la critique fit de même et ne bravât les rayons 'de certaines figures devant lesquelles se sont inclinés les siècles 'qu'après les avoir adorées.' But it is impossible to separate the moral and the intellectual. Ethical science, as science, is progressive; here, as elsewhere, the child of to-day possesses knowledge which the sages of antiquity did not possess. Their relative position, of course, is unchanged; he is a child, they were sages. What is changed is the sum of knowledge. This is an increasing capital; it grows under our eyes. If we start from the familiar threefold classification of duties-to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbour-how great is the developement accomplished and in process of accomplishment! The realisation rather than the annihilation of self presents itself to us as the object of moral effort; of how much of the asceticism, the ritual observance, the assent to propositions embodying nonreligious subject matter, by which men better than we believed that the Deity could be propitiated, does He assure us, 'I com