Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/57

 There are whole libraries upon the subject. Turn to any treatise on the causes of the French Revolution, and you will find the French peasant of 1780 but little removed, in legal rights and daily tasks, from the fellahin who built Cheops' pyramid. Consult any work on the rise of the Industrial System in England, and you will find the towns of that great liberty-loving land filled, in the same year, with a half-starved and anthropoid proletariat, and the countryside swarming with a dispossessed and despairing peasantry. Open any school-book of American history, and you will see Germans sold like cattle by their masters. If you thirst for more, keep on: the tale was precisely the same in Italy, in Spain, in Russia, in Scandinavia, and in what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. The Irish, at the close of the Eighteenth Century, were clamped under a yoke that it took more than a century of effort to throw off. The Scotch, roving their bare intolerable hills, were only two steps removed from savagery, and even cannibalism. The Welsh, but recently delivered from voodooism to Methodism, were being driven into their own coal-mines. There was no liberty anywhere in Europe, even in name, until 1789,