Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/195

Rh efficient agents for the exercise of arbitrary power. This was the work, not of the Reign of Terror and the period of convulsion, which was barren of political results, but of the ideas of 1789, incorporated in that Constitution of 1791 which continued for seventy years the model of all foreign Constitutions, until Austria returned to the mediaeval originals which England alone had preserved. The purpose of all the Continental governments, framed on that pattern, is not that the people should obtain security for freedom, but participation of power. The increase in the number of those who share the authority renders the authority still more irresistible ; and as power is associated with wealth, those who are interested in the augmentation of power cannot be interested in the diminution of expenditure : and thus parliamentary government generally results in an improved administration and increased resources, but also in addition to the pressure and the expenses of the State. All this was singularly verified in Cavour's administration in Piedmont.

Like most of the continental Liberals, and like most men who are not religious, he considered the State as endowed with indefinite power, and individual rights as subject to its supreme authority ; whilst, like the revolutionists in France, he accepted the legacy of absolutism left by the old régime, and sought to preserve its force under contrary forms. Societies are really divided not into monarchies and republics, but into democracies and aristocracies ; whatever the form of Government, there are in fact only two types, organised and atomic society, and the commonest and most visible sign of the two is equality or inequality. The real basis of inequality is the privilege of a part as contrasted with the rights of the whole, and its simplest essential form is the privilege not of class, but of age — that is, inheritance by primogeniture. Nothing else is required for an aristocracy ; nothing else can create an aristocracy. Cavour, though a noble, and an enemy of democracy, was a decided assertor of its fundamental principle. "Civil equality," he wrote in Il Risorgimento, "is the great principle of modern society." The statute