Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/442

416 were put to death by the democratising bourgeoisie. Although Rousseau, Meslier, Morelly, Mably, and other writers, had condemned private property and inequality of property, the republic declared property sacrosanct, just as absolutism had declared the monarchy sacrosanct. Attacks on the principle of private property became a capital offence!

HE revolution was superseded by the restoration, and the so-called romanticism which followed the revolution was largely characterised by a strengthening of religious sentiment and above all by recatholicisation, Napoleon entered into the concordat with Pius VII; the inquisition was set up anew in Spain; the Jesuit order was reinstated; Alexander I, Francis I, and Frederick William III entered into the holy alliance to assist divine providence (§ 15); in England, Catholic emancipation was carried through.

Liberalism underwent transformation. In the philosophic field liberalism became a supporter of positivism, that peculiar mixtum compositum of progress and reaction. The liberals associated the doctrine of evolution with positivism.

Positivism, with its historism and relativism, provided liberalism with weapons against radical assaults, whether from the right or from the left. The idea of progress was toned down, and the tolerance advocated by Locke was now extended towards the ideas and trends against which liberalism had previously fought.

Thus to an increasing extent liberalism became a system of half-measures.

The antirevolutionary school of jurists opposed historical law to natural law, and countered revolution with the doctrine of legitimism. After the revolution, the appeal for liberty was replaced by the demand for order; liberty, it was said, must arise out of order. The demand for equality was quietly dropped, or in some cases scientific reasons for the change of sentiments were adduced, reasons based upon Darwinian considerations.

Before 1848, to reactionaries of the type of Metternich and Tsar Nicholas the term liberalism was synonymous with the term revolution.

The church, which had been fought and in places even