Page:History Of The Origin And Establishment Of The Inquisition In Portugal (IA historyoftheorig012210mbp).pdf/15

 PREFACE Only a few years ago certain men and certain schools of thought, confounding the ideas of liberty and progress with those of license and excess, law with oppression, and property, the inviolable issue of toil, with spoliation and robbery, and adopting the dissolution of the social order as their system of reform, filled the middle class (the most powerful of all the classes of which modern society is composed, and the only one that is really and truly powerful) with terror and alarm by the insane projects they put forward. This mistake on the part of many men otherwise of eminent ability, who, to some extent had good reason to criticize many of the institutions enjoyed by free countries as faulty or incomplete, paved the way and furnished pretexts for a deplorable reaction throughout Europe. It was a serious state of affairs, not so much on account of its violence, its exaggeration, and its materialistic character, as because of the moral reaction that followed these outward manifestations. Therein lay the danger that threatened the future.

Tyranny, once more lifting its head over almost the whole of the continent of Europe, trampling representative government beneath the feet of its battalions of infantry and its squadrons of cavalry, passing in triumph along crowded streets, and enthroned on the time-honored and battered shield of absolutism raised aloft on a forest of bayonets, is a repulsive sight, but one that is profitable to human progress, as almost all historical phenomena have been, even those which were apparently most contrary to that progress. It makes a lot of noise in the world, and it gets things done, though it is as transitory as the standing armies brought into existence by absolutism for its own purposes, and with which it ought long ago to have passed into the realms of tradition. The crimes which the reaction is perpetrating, and the blood it has shed, will prove morally and economically a very reasonable price to pay for an issue of the most vital importance—the annihilation of that brute force which is nominally charged with the fulfilment of a duty that devolves, and always must devolve, on all citizens alike, namely the defense of their native land. The more this reaction abuses its power, the sooner will come the day of its final disenchantment and the peoples of the world, taught by their own bitter experience, will finally sever the last artery that still makes beat the heart of a desperate and dying tyranny.

But the moral reaction that accompanies the material reaction calls for more serious attention on the part of the sincere and prudent friends of civilization and liberty. Besides the cheers of the intoxicated soldiery, 195