Page:The story of the French revolution (IA storyoffrenchrev00baxe).pdf/159

 barriers between us and our naive and simple-minded ancestors. The old Merry England, for example, the England of the fairy ring and the Maypole, had passed away for ever. In politics the reign of the bourgeoisie with its oppression resting on cunning and hypocrisy had shut out the possibility of an enduring reaction to the coarser and more direct methods of feudal domina- tion.

There are several minor points worthy of notice af- forded by the course of the French Revolution. One feature of the period, already alluded to, its perpetual reference to classical models, and its somewhat mechani- cal attempt to make history repeat itself — to reproduce the Republics of ancient Greece 2nd Rome in eighteenth- century France —- can never be left out of sight. Every man’s head was full of Plutarch’s Lives. All men, how- ever little else they knew, seem to have had at least a superficial schoolboy smattering of Roman history. Al- most every speech and every newspaper article of the time bristles with references, to Coriolanus, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, or Cesar. In fact, Roman history was to the French Revolution very much what the Jewish annals, contained in the Bible, were to the English rebellion under Charles I. “We,” or rather modern science and historical criticism, “have changed all that.” We no longer look to the past as a model for the society of the present or the future. The doctrine of evolution has taught us that human society, like everything else, is a growth, and that though corresponding and analogous phases certainly do recur in history, we can yet never. argue back from one period to another, as though there had been no intervening development, or as though the economical, intellectual, and political conditions were sub- stantially the same, or might be made the same.

Another point the Revolution teaches us is the effec- tive power of minorities. The Terror itself (whatever view we may take as to its justifiability), it cannot be