Page:Civilization and barbarism (1868).djvu/169

definite knowledge of political organization, could not be expected to know more than the great men of Europe. I desire to call attention to the significance of this fact. The study of constitutions, races, and creeds, in short, history, has now diffused a certain amount of practical knowledge which warns us against the glitter of theories based upon a priori conceptions; but previous to 1820, nothing of that had transpired in the European world. France was roused into insurrection by the paradoxes of the Social Contract; Buenos Ayres was similarly roused; Montesquieu designated three powers, and immediately we had three; Benjamin Constant and Bentham annulled power; here they declared it originally null; Say and Smith preached free-trade; "commercial liberty," we repeated; Buenos Ayres confessed and believed all that the learned world of Europe believed and confessed. Not till after the revolution of 1830 in France, and its incomplete results, did the Social Sciences take a new direction and illusions begin to be dispelled. From that time European books began to come to us, which demonstrated that Voltaire had not much reason, and that Rousseau was a sophist, and Mably and Raynal anarchists; that there were no three powers, nor any Social Contract, etc. From that time we learned something of races, of tendencies, of national habits, of historical antecedents. Tocqueville revealed to us for the first time the secret of North America; Sismondi laid bare the emptiness of constitutions; Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot, gave us the spirit of history; the revolution of 1830, all the hollowness of the constitutionalism of Benjamin Constant; the Spanish revolution, all that