Lectures on Modern History - Faculty of Social Sciences

<strong>Lectures</strong> on Modern History/15the State against the forces dominant in society, the division of poweragainst the State, the thought of individuals against the practice of ages,neither authorities, nor minorities, nor majorities can command implicitobedience; and, where there has been long and arduous experience, arampart of tried conviction and accumulated knowledge, where there isa fair level of general morality, education, courage, and self-restraint,there, if there only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition oflife towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been movingthrough the allotted space. You will know it by outward signs: Representation,the extinction of slavery, the reign of opinion, and the like;better still by less apparent evidences : the security of the weaker groupsand the liberty of conscience, which, effectually secured, secures therest.Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on acontradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more oftenby violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is towardsconvulsions and catastrophes, if the world owes religious libertyto the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the English, federalrepublicanism to the American, political equality to the French andits successors, what is to become of us, docile and attentive students ofthe absorbing Past? The triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian.By its authentic exponents, Jefferson and Sieves, the Revolution ofthe last century repudiates history. Their followers renounced acquaintancewith it, and were ready to destroy its records and to abolish itsinoffensive professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction,is that this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly andindirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, animpulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor ofcivilisation than ever before, and a movement began in the world ofminds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancientlearning. The dispensation under which we live and labour consists firstin the recoil from the negative spirit that rejected the law of growth, andpartly in the endeavour to classify and adjust the Revolution, and toaccount for it by the natural working of historic causes The Conservativeline of writers, under the name of the Romantic or Historical School,had its seat in Germany, looked upon the Revolution as an alien episode,the error of an age, a disease to be treated by the investigation of itsorigin, and strove to unite the broken threads and to restore the normalconditions of organic evolution. The Liberal School, whose home was