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independent of landed possessions, which was making head at that time, was a relatively justifiable and revolutionary force. This it was which gave it the power which led to its victorious development, and to the suppression both of the movement of the peasants and that of the nobles.
I have dwelt with some emphasis on this point, gentlemen,—first, in order to prove to you the reasonableness and the progress of freedom, in the development of history, and that by an example from which it is by no means obvious on a superficial survey; secondly, because historians are far from having recognised this reactionary character of the rising of the peasants, and the true cause of its failure which was solely dependent upon that character, but on the contrary, deceived by external appearances, hold the peasant war to have been a truly revolutionary movement.
Thirdly, I have dwelt upon it because this spectacle is constantly repeating itself in all ages, that men who do not think clearly—and to this class, gentlemen, those who are apparently most learned, and even professors may belong, and, as the Church of St. Paul with its sad memorials has shewn us, do extremely often belong—fall into the extraordinary illusion of holding that which is only a more consistent and complete expression of a period of history and an organisation of society even then passing away, to be a new revolutionary principle.
Against such men and such courses, which are revolutionary only in the imagination of these men—for there will be plenty of them in the future as there
