Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/567

Rh Radicalism is frequently unprogressive. The radicals fail to understand that earlier revolutions have provided us with other and often more effective means of democratisation, and they do not know how to turn these means to account. Once constitutionalism, and still more once parliamentarism, has been attained, constitutional channels offer scope for such effective political activities that revolution becomes needless and often futile. Ethically considered, revolution is permissible only in the last resort. Not until all other means have been tried must we have recourse to the extreme measure of revolution, and then only after the most profound searchings of conscience.

Progress does not signify a continuous and positively morbid lust for innovation. Radicals and revolutionaries, no less than conservatives and reactionaries, are affected with the malady of historism, are guided by chronology instead of by a study of the facts. The conservative regards that as good which existed yesterday; the revolutionary regards that as good which exists to-day or will exist to-morrow. The conservative succumbs to traditionalism; the revolutionary succumbs to radicalism, to philoneism, to modernism, to à-la-modism. In this sense I contrast historism with realism.

Progressive democracy desires to overcome both conservatism and radicalism, for both are utopian. Without a clearly conceived aim, and devoting all his energies to an attack upon the historically extant, the revolutionary is apt to exercise a purely negative influence. Such a revolutionary is the awful example of a politician for whom the existence of the old is a necessary presupposition, of one who could not live were it not for the existence of the old. The revolutionary becomes a reactionary, the opponent of philistinism is himself a philistine. Antiphilistinism is frequently nothing more than a form of philistinism.

F I mistake not, among the participators in the French revolution Thomas Paine may be regarded as the most conspicuous example of a modern, democratically minded, deliberately progressive revolutionary. His writings supply the philosophical foundations of the democratic revolution. Precisely because his participation in the revolution was so