Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/679

Rh restraint nearly anywhere, liberty and government must be at daggers drawn.

It is indeed true that the application of natural rights principles, at least where it was really effective, was not so bad as the theory. The practice, in fact, contradicted the theory; for the substantial result of this early liberalism was the writing into law of certain liberties which appeared to be inseparable from the maintenance of a humane standard of life. Its practice presented the paradox of securing by law rights which the theory held to be prior to and the foundation of law. The theory was, indeed, a doctrine of protest which derived its content mainly from the fact that it was supposed to connote certain concrete reforms which the liberals agreed to accept but which had little or no logical relation to the theory itself. Hence the theory worked best where liberalism faced the problem of remodeling institutions already well established, as was the case in England and the United States. Where a more thoroughgoing reconstruction was required, as in nearly every other country, the doctrinaire character of natural rights liberalism manifested itself, and the modern reconstruction came not so much through liberalism as in spite of it. Cavour in Italy was hampered scarcely more by the Austrian and Neapolitan reactionaries than by the extreme followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Bismarck in Germany crushed alike the constitutionalism of the liberals and the feudalism of the Junkers.

Inconsistencies in theory, however, were not the only factors which tended to discredit the older liberalism. Two powerful sentiments also worked against it, viz., the growing sense of national unity and an increasingly historical habit of thought in regard to all social problems. The natural rights position, both in origin and nature, was cosmopolitan; it depended upon the assumption of a certain inherent core of rationality which belonged to every individual by virtue merely of the fact that he was a human being. The claim to rights was made on behalf of a common humanity, and differences of time and place, of race and nationality, were conceived to be superficial and unimportant by comparison. With the turn of the century, however, the