for religion
is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability of the State,
and of the safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of the
science of government, know that fact at least."

M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, was lamenting that in
France, "freedom was forsaken;" "a thing for which it is said that no one
any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to me, perceive that,
as in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a
religion or religions, which are free themselves, and which teach men to
be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is,
reverence for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be
slaves.

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see;
who will say: "If religion be the pillar of political and social order,
there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse
to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man
and God. The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and
tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to
do its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to
enslave the soul."

And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the
poet says:

It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.

LECTURE II--CENTRALISATION

The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase
of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms. The
bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its
value, its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the
kings. Their capital, being invested in trade, was necessarily subject
to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so
forth, that its holders, however individually brave, were timid as a
class. They could never hold out on strike against the governments, and
had to submit to the powers that were, whatever they were, under penalty
of ruin.

But on the Continent, and especially in France and Germany, unable to
strengthen itself by intermarriage with the noblesse, they retained that
timidity which is the fruit of the insecurity of trade; and had to submit
to a more and more centralised despotism, and grow up as they could, in
the face of exasperating hindrances to wealth, to education, to the
possession, in many parts of France, of large land