النظام القديم والثورة

On the other hand, liberty alone can combat the vices which are natural to this class of societies, and arrest their downward progress. Nothing but liberty A2 X PEEPACE. can draw men forth from the isolation into which their independence naturally drives them — can compel them to associate together, in order to come to a common understanding, to debate, and to compromise together on their joint concerns. Liberty alone can free them from money-worship, and divert them from their petty, every-day business cares, to teach them and make them feel that there is a country above and beside them. It alone awakens more energetic and higher passions than the love of ease, provides ambition with nobler aims than the acquisition of wealth, and yields the light which reveals, in clear outline, the virtues and the vices of mankind. Democratic societies which are not free may be rich, refined, ornate, even magnificent, and powerful in proportion to the weight of their homogeneous mass ; they may develop private virtues, produce good family-men, honest merchants, respectable landowners, and even good Christians — ^for their country is not of this world, and it is the glory of their religion that it produces them in the most corrupt societies and under the worst governments — theEoman empire during its decline was full of such as these ; but there are things which such societies as those I speak of can never produce, and these are great citizens, and, above all, a great people. I will go farther; I do not hesitate to affirm that the common level of hearts and minds will never cease to sink so long as equality and despotism are combined. This is what I thought and wrote twenty years ago.…