e Conservative and the pure Progressive; two
figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other
intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human
generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward
or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the
coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to
keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the
dullest mediaeval morality we might have a joke about a progressive
gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go
further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age
of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades,
synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that
could cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But
they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted
the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from
Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation,
often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal
quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not
have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the
torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike
desired definite _things_, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and
permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative
have been content with two words.

Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into
some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century
stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the
mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was
touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it
fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last
two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of
becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered. By
the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the
republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness
until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But
in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism,
destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the
l