entrated possessions,
auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more; that
commerce having risen against land, labour against wealth, the
State against the forces dominant in society #48, the division of
power against the State, the thought of individuals against the
practice of ages, neither authorities, nor minorities, nor
majorities can command implicit obedience; and, where there has
been long and arduous experience, a rampart of tried conviction
and accumulated knowledge, where there is a fair level of general
morality, education, courage, and self-restraint, there, if there
only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition of life
towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been
moving through the allotted space #50. 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 groups #51 and the liberty of conscience,
which, effectually secured, secures the rest.

Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on a
contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more often
by violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is
towards convulsions and catastrophes #52, if the world owes religious
liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the
English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to
the French and its successors #53, what is to become of us, docile and
attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the
Revolutionist annuls the historian #54. By its authentic exponents,
Jefferson and Sieyes, the Revolution of the last century repudiates
history. Their followers renounced acquaintance with it, and were
ready to destroy its records and to abolish its inoffensive
professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that
this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and
indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an
impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor
of civilisation than ever before, and a movement began in the world of
minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancient
learning #55. The dispensation under which we live and labour consists
first in the recoil from the negative spirit that rejected the law of
growth, and partly in the endeavour to classify and adjust the