slighted, it would make no difference, so that he might strike for the Rhine without risking the loss of our friendship. Again, after Ferrières, when a good deal depended on coolness, and temper, and accuracy, and the government of defence was in need of a judicious bottle-holder, our ambassador was away.
A dozen lines, from first to last, in the 570 pages would meet every grievance. The question would remain whether it is best, with effacing fingers, to make history with individual character, class interests, and the fortuitous changes of opinion, or with the ceaseless conflict of defined forms of thought. We begin to see daylight in the Cromwellian era when we know what a Calvinist meant and an Arminian, a Presbyterian and an Independent, a Baptist and a Socinian. It would be a luminous moment if, for the perpetual round of violence and weakness, folly and crime, somebody would display the operation of the original materials that supplied the French Revolution, the distinct systems that divided the three assemblies and governed the several constitutions : the eighteenth-century law of nature, the American rights of man, English parliamentary institutions, the abstract constitutionalism of Montesquieu, Voltaire's humanitarian code, Protestant toleration, Jansenist theories of Church and State, the perfectibility of the encyclopædists, the whiggism of Holbach, the Helvetian doctrine of equality, Rousseau's democracy, the socialism of Mably, Turgot's political economy, the unguarded sentence in the Wealth of Nations which gave to the Provençal priest the fulcrum to overturn the monarchy of Lewis XIV., the conditional contract which Marat transmuted into a theory of massacre, the policy of the four Genevese who worked Mirabeau ; and our times might be clearer if, instead of our own devices, the historian explained what it is really all about, wherein a Conservative differs from Whig and Tory, where a Liberal draws the line against Whig and Radical, how you distinguish a philosophic from an economic Radical, or Manchester from Birmingham, at what point democracy begins, how it combines with socialism, and why some
