Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/211

Rh The child loves to push things to extremes, and, armed with his petty logic, goes from destruction to destruction without concerning himself about obstacles. How many theorists have reconstructed the state in the same manner! Universal suffrage should never forget that radicals may be good opponents, but are detestable governors. Unfortunately, in the real world of the ballot, even the violence of the radicals has a chance of success with the masses, to whom often it is enough to promise everything, to get everything from them.

The liberal progressive spirit corresponds with the age of youth and early manhood, which is especially distinguished by the development of the productive forces. The young man endeavors to assert himself, to produce, to take his place in the world. Liberal natures offer the same character, and the organizing power which they show is the infallible sign of true liberalism. The liberal loves liberty above everything else; but he suspects liberties that are granted or gotten up for the occasion. He has faith only in liberty that is innate, or that has been conquered by labor and effort. Progress is his aim.

The conservative liberal is the man, some forty or fifty years old, who is less concerned about acquiring new possessions than about improving and expanding those that he has. The conservative is less enthusiastic than the progressist, not that he does not appreciate his ideas, but because he more clearly sees the difficulty of realizing them. As the progressist above all loves liberty, the conservative loves pre-eminently the law which gives force and stability to relations that are recognized as necessary. Further, he attaches himself particularly to historic right, of which he maintains even the traditional form. He wishes the movement toward the future to respect the rights of the past. Thus he is little aggressive, and his particular force is the defensive. His natural place is after a revolution, or a fundamental transformation, when the living question is to preserve the conquests that have been made, and secure them against new abuses. Great legislators are generally progressists; great jurists are for the most part conservatives. Reactionary absolutism corresponds with old age, when life is declining and approaching its end, and the passive elements become preponderant. Its ideal is passive obedience; but, if its tranquillity is disturbed, it becomes irritable and cruel.

While we may recognize the part of truth in such a psychology of the parties, we need not believe that each age is rigorously analogous to any of the characters mentioned; the affair is one simply of general tendencies and means, which do not exclude individual differences. The progress of the state will be regular and consistent with a just conservation of acquired results, if the national representation is composed of two great liberal parties, one progressive and the other conservative, with a few elements of radicalism counterbalanced by a spice of absolutism. The two extremes are gradually becoming more restricted, to the advantage of moderate and liberal tendencies, and