Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

THIS book is a result of having studied the development of political and religious liberty for forty years. How well I have selected my authorities the reader can judge. I will merely say that I have mentioned no writer whom I have not studied carefully. The sun-dial has been so far my model that victories in the cause of freedom are more prominent than defeats in the pages that follow. It did not seem necessary to give much space to familiar authors, though I should have liked to do justice to Buckle, George Eliot, and Swinburne.
I regret that I have been unable to tell at any adequate length how the Republic which was proclaimed at Paris in 1870 has survived longer than any other government set up in France during the century. Its enemies have been voted down repeatedly everywhere; the schools have been made free from ecclesiastical control; and the hostility of the clergy has been suppressed by the Pope. The French are still too fond of military glory, and too ignorant of the value of personal liberty and local self-government; but rapid advance in freedom is already possible under the Constitution of 1884. Not only France, but also Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, give proof that the time has gone by when Americans had any right to claim, as they did in my boyhood, to be the only people able to govern themselves.
If any nation can maintain a free press, just laws, and elections of local magistrates, it ought to enjoy these rights, however slight may be its fitness for becoming a real republic; and the suppression of such rights by Cromwell and Napoleon cannot be pardoned consistently by any friend to liberty. Napoleon's chief guilt, as I must here mention, was in ordering the expulsion from office by soldiers, in 1797, of representatives of the people who were striving to maintain liberty at home and establish peace abroad. If there were any necessity for his usurpation two years later, it was largely of his own making. Despotism had already been made tolerable, however, even during the first Republic, by the national fondness for war. This is according to a principle which is taught by Herbert Spencer, and which is illustrated in the following pages by many instances from the history of France and other nations. The horrors of the Reign of Terror may be explained, though not excused, by the greatness of the danger from invaders as well as rebels. And there were very few cases of punishing differences merely about religion by the guillotine.