Page:Man or the State.djvu/73

55 and sometimes of profound genius are to be diminished, in order that a large part of their scanty earnings may go to swell the pomp of an idle and ignorant courts minister to the caprice of a few powerful individuals, and too often supply them with the means of turning against the people resources which the people called into existence.

These, and the foregoing statements respecting the effects produced on European society by political legislation, are not doubtful or hypothetical inferences, but are such as every reader of history may verify for himself. Indeed, some of them are still acting in England; and, in one country or another, the whole of them may be seen in full force. When put together they compose an aggregate so formidable that we may well wonder how, in the face of them, civilization has been able to advance. That, under such circumstances, it has advanced is a decisive proof of the extraordinary energy of Man; and justifies a confident belief that as the pressure of legislation is diminished, and the human mind less hampered, the progress will continue with accelerated speed. But it is absurd, it would be a mockery of all sound reasonings to ascribe to legislation any share in the progress, or to expect any benefit from future legislators except that sort of benefit which consists in undoing the work of their predecessors. This is what the present generation claims at their hands; and it should be remembered that what one generation solicits as a boon the next generation demands as a right. And, when the right is pertinaciously refused, one of two things has always happened: either the nation has retrograded or else the people have risen. Should the government remain firm, this is the cruel dilemma in which men are placed: if they submit, they injure their country; if they rebel, they may injure it still more. In the ancient monarchies of the East, their usual plan was to yield; in the monarchies of Europe, it has been to resist. Hence those insurrections and rebellions which occupy so large a space in modern history, and which are but repetitions of the old story, the undying struggle between oppressors and oppressed. It would, however, be unjust to deny that in one country the fatal crisis has now for several generations been successfully averted.