beginning to dream morning dreams which strive confusedly to interpret the unusual sounds, still echoing, of that tumultuous political movement which signalized the century's close. The men of the eighteenth century may have convinced themselves that thought is a motion of the molecules of the grey matter of the brain; but they believed that thoughts could destroy the world and create it anew. Materialists in one sense of the word they may be styled; but they were assuredly zealous spiritualists. That was not an age of unbelief, but of most living faith, and therefore it was full of miracles—an age when men could say to this mountain, "Be removed, and cast into the sea," and when it would be done even as they had said.

The French Revolution is often spoken of as if it were merely or mainly a destructive movement. Now, no people can take a lasting inspiration from destruction. When one has wreaked one's will upon the obnoxious thing, the impulse is exhausted, or can find no material upon which to exert itself. Mr. Carlyle repeats in varying picturesque phrases that the Revolution was the "tremendous doom'svoice of France against a world of human shams;" but to Germany is assigned the nobler work of reconstruction. Even so careful an inquirer as De Tocqueville seems at times inclined to look upon the abolishing of feudalism and privilege as the great accomplishment of the Revolution. Yet De Tocqueville leads any thinking reader of his "Ancien Régime " right up face to face with the truth. "The French Revolution," he observes,*" differed from every other political revolution in this-it proceeded in the manner of religious revolutions." What does this mean? It means that the French Revolution was not territorial, that it properly belonged to no country, that it united remote nations as though they were nearest neighbours, that it was essentially propagandist, and inspired in its agents the spirit of proselytism. And what was the cause of this? Could this have been, unless there was something more than negation and destruction in the Revolution? What was that which made the French Revolution resemble the revolutions of religion? This: Religions consider man in himself—man as man, not man as of this or that country, or race, or rank, or occupation. And in precisely a similar way the French Revolution considered the citizen in an abstract fashionlooked at man as man, independently of country, times, race, or position. This it is which gives to the French Revolution what no other political revolution ever possessed-the universal significance of a religion. Hence, as De Tocqueville has said, the Revolution

* Burke had already observed it. See the chapter on the French Revolution in Mr. Morley's "Edmund Burke " (p. 274). Whoever would understand the Revolution, its good and its evil, should read Mr. Morley's criticism, which leaves little to be said.

became not less than a kind of new and incomplete religion, which, like Islamism, inundated the world with its soldiers, its apostles, and its martyrs. Thus it explained the fact that all oppressed nationalities-Poland, Roumania, Italy-have looked to France, even when such looking was vain and sorrowful, in their struggles for freedom. England may possess as much or more of true liberty; but, apart from her insular position, and her insular mind and heart, England has never been the apostle of a political creed which is for all mankind. The continuous growth of her free institutions, admirable as such growth is, has made her possession of freedom essentially an English affair-something which is attached to the soil. The misfortune, if such it was, of France, that she had to break with her political tradition, became the occasion of her distinguishing glory. Here we discover the secret and the justification of a manner of feeling towards their own country observable in many French writers, and which is commonly explained as a part of their national vanity. "It is evidently," says Mr. Carlyle, " their belief. . . that France is the new Mount Zion of the universe. They believe that they are the Christ of nations."" They believe this, because it seems to them that the truths of which the French people became the depository are a good news for all men, and not for any one nation in particular-oracles of God, which are no more peculiarly theirs than the announcements made by Christ were the property of the Jewish people by whom they first were heard. This may be an erroneous opinion, but it is something quite distinct from national vanity.

Burke, who published his celebrated letter in the year 1790, was not slow to perceive that the men of the Revolution had set about founding society and government, as he would have it, upon abstractions. With considerable national self-gratulation (which yet it would be unjust to call national vanity) he contrasts the English mode of proceeding, founded upon observation of concrete facts, upon prudent compromises and concessions, with the pedantic political metaphysic and pedantic logical method of the French philosophers and statesmen. But Burke was never guilty of falling into the error of supposing that these so-called abstractions, and the enthusiasm which they possess a strange power of arousing, were powerless in political affairs, meant nothing, and were, in fact, only certain pompous and empty phrases, at which a sensible man may laugh. The words "liberty, equality, and fraternity" have been discredited by their too frequent abuse upon the lips of demagogues, who employ them for their own unworthy purposes; but it is hardly true, as the average British bourgeois seems to suppose, that "liberty, equality, and fraternity" are noisy Latin words, which signify nonentity; nor is it

the case that if one loves what these names represent, and is willing to do and suffer something for the sake of them, he is, therefore, either an amiable or a dangerous lunatic. Burke never erred in this way. But, with his profound and noble sense of the importance of what is inherited from the past, and of the continuity of human development, he believed that political structures must grow from or be built upon that which actually exists; and he found something contrary to the way of nature, and something worthy only of a bookish theoric, in the scheme of beginning at the beginning, of founding society upon elementary principles now for the first time discovered. He did not perceive that the very inheritance which we have received from the past may be a power of recurring to these elementary principles; the very point to which the past has brought us may be one at which, by virtue of a deeper relation with it, we can afford to let superficial relations go. Christianity may be the true development of Judaism; Christ may have come to fulfil the law. Nevertheless, such a development necessarily involved the abolition of the law of ordinances, and the founding of religious society upon first principles of universal import. The general assertion that every one has a soul to be saved, and that all men are equal objects of divine solicitude, no soul more precious in God's sight than another -that dangerous levelling doctrine which is too abstract to recognise the distinctions between the Brahman and the Pariah, between the Greek, the Jew, and the Barbarian-is that generally believed to be a meaningless metaphysical conception? If Christianity be not altogether fantastical because it recognises that all men have certain wants as spiritual creatures, that certain acts and states are expedient for all the souls of men, how is the Revolution, which goes hand in hand with Christianity, quite an unpractical piece of metaphysics because it asserts that all men have certain needs as political and social creatures, and because it recognises certain expediencies which proceed from the very nature of man as a member of a nation and a state? In truth, what are called metaphysical abstractions and the notion of political doctrinaires are assertions about positive facts, more important than any other facts because they exist everywhere and at all times.

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Here, then, was something positive in the French Revolutionassertion that in social and political institutions, as well as in religious, a view of man as man is essential as the basis of all construction. What this view of man as man was may be partially explained by saying that it regarded every one as the possessor of something which, whatever may be its genesis, is indeed when developed the elementary atom of all moral and spiritual, all social and political

bodies, something unalienable, unapproachable, unsubduable-a will. It is that which each man has most peculiar, it is, indeed, the man himself. Nothing which is not willed is a man's own act, or has any moral significance. Now equality, which on its negative side meant the abolition of privilege and caste, meant upon the positive that these incommensurable things, which cannot be classified, human wills, are the ultimate atoms of society. Some such doctrine undeniably accompanied the more intelligible statement that it was expedient that every citizen should possess equal legal rights. Few revolutionary doctrinaires would be willing to found upon the basis of expediency the dogma of "the sovereignty of the people," which is but a synonym for political equality. Some metaphysical or moral ground of the dogma is conceived to be essential, and to be discoverable; and that ground is none other than the assertion that human wills, for which no common measure can be found, are in the last analysis the constitutents of the body politic. National action is possible only as proceeding from the national will; and the national will is the united force of all the individual wills which make up the nation. But equality, though the condition by which truly national action becomes possible, does not imply that such action shall be reasonable or moral. Liberty must teach men how to act rightly. For, when interpreted in social and political institutions, liberty does not mean the right to do what we like, and say what we like, but the right of bringing our best self into power. Freedom of the press, the right of public meeting, the career open to all talents, and such like, though fruitful of evil, are much more fruitful of good; they are the means of discovering our best thoughts and of enforcing them. No one ever supposed that by liberty was meant the right to commit homicide, or to utter slander, or to steal. What liberty means, then, is this, that our better self shall in no way be hindered of its desires; and it declares that, with this end in view, it is everywhere and at all times expedient that certain rights, powers, and immunities be possessed by every individual.* A very real and positive principle.

And what is meant by fraternity? It means a society founded upon love and common helpfulness. It means the doctrine of Christ become something better than a dream and an ideal, and at last obtaining political recognition. It means an organization of the world upon the theory of mutual trust and regard. It means the abolition of slavery, of the cruel punishments of old times, of wars of conquest. These things have already disappeared, or, as we hoped, were at least disappearing. But it means much more that is yet to come. The abolition of pauperism, the enfranchisement of the workman from grinding day-long toil, the union of the interests of labour

* That is, of course, in civilised communities.

and capital, the federation of nations for mutual protection and help. Even the extravagant attempts of Socialists to embody prematurely in the real world the sentiment of fraternity, in so far as those attempts are not the selfish struggles of a class, but the generous delusions of men whom the too great light of this sun of the world, the principle of faternity, has dazzled and half-blinded-even these extravagant attempts must be taken as an earnest of better things to come. Mr. Carlyle himself, our chief pessimist, here stands side by side with the Reds. He, too, sees a nobler possibility for man than society founded upon the nexus of cash-payment, upon rivalry and competition, upon self-interest and distrust. When the new heavens and the new earth appear, it will be a glory to men of the present day to have dreamed of them, nay, even to have so much as turned uneasily in their sleep, and moaned, rather than to have slept the sleep of the besotted and the slothful.

The ideas of the Revolution, whatever they were, made France strong. Kings, perceiving their danger from the spreading infection, leagued against the Republic. The Revolution and the old monarchies were essentially antagonistic; the safety of the one depended upon the destruction of the other. It is a small matter how an occasion was found for declaring war against France; the cause of such war is obvious. The issue is obvious also. The men of the Republic were not the men of the Second Empire; they possessed ideas as well as interests, and souls as well as bodies. They did not fear to die, because there was something higher than themselves to which they owed allegiance, and which would live. "We knew perfectly that bullets could do nothing against us," said Baudot. These were the men who are described as the offspring of an age of materialism and incredulity. If they were incredulous, it was of the harm a bullet can do to a human creature. An army of souls is irresistible; it is only bodies which possess no material force. And, accordingly, the revolutionary levies hurled back the invaders. What made France strong in 1792, why should it not make France strong to-day? It was a faith in truths which do not grow old, which assuredly are still young and full of vigour. It was the sense that the nation was living its true life, and must maintain that true life, or utterly perish.

But the Revolution failed, and France was given over to her worst passions under the guidance of one supreme, bad will. The causes of the failure of the Revolution were many, but two were probably of more pernicious influence than the rest. First, France had not accomplished her religious revolution, and, consequently, a dangerous enemy of her political revolution remained within her frontier-the Church. The Church was the living embodiment of a spiritual