arent precision, that during the earliest part of
this epoch, Europe was divided between the champions and antagonists of
religion, as, during its latter portion, it was between the enemies and
supporters of political reformation. But a deeper analysis will show us
that these names were but the badges of ideas, always complex, sometimes
contradictory--the war-cry of contending parties, by whom the reality
was now forgotten, or to whom, compared with other purposes, it was
altogether subordinate.

Take, for instance, the exercise of political power. Is a state free in
proportion to the number of its subjects who are admitted to rank among
its citizens, or to the degree in which its recognised citizens are
invested with political authority? In the latter point of view, the
government of Athens was the freest the world has ever seen. In the
former it was a most exclusive and jealous oligarchy. "For a city to be
well governed," says Aristotle in his Politics, "those who share in its
government must be free from the care of providing for their own
support. This," he adds, "is an admitted truth."

Again, the attentive reader can hardly fail to see that, in the struggle
between Pompey and Caesar, Caesar represented the popular as Pompey did
the aristocratical party, and that Pompey's triumph would have been
attended, as Cicero clearly saw, by the domination of an aristocracy in
the shape most oppressive and intolerable. The government of Rome, after
several desperate struggles, had degenerated into the most corrupt
oligarchy, in which all the eloquence of Cicero was unable to kindle the
faintest gleam of public virtue. Owing to the success of Caesar, the
civilized world exchanged the dominion of several tyrants for that of
one, and the opposition to his design was the resistance of the few to
the many.

Or we may take another view of the subject. By freedom do we mean the
absence of all restraint in private life, the non-interference by the
state in the details of ordinary intercourse? According to such a view,
the old government of Venice and the present government of Austria,
where debauchery is more than tolerated, would be freer than the Puritan
commonwealths in North America, where dramatic representations were
prohibited as impious, and death was the legal punishment of
fornication.

These are specimens of the difficulties by which we are beset, when we
endeavour to obtain an exact and faithful image from the trouble