And, in addition to what may be called the offensive action of Conservative thought against progress, history contains many examples of its defensive action when it is faced by an outburst of Liberal agitation or by the pressure of a Liberal tendency. Sometimes this defensive action takes the vulgar form of attempted extermination.

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The Scribes, the Pharisees, the Priests, the Elders, and the governing theocrats in Jerusalem, finding that Christianity attacked them personally, held them up to contempt, and destroyed their prestige, their authority, and occupation, attempted to save their system and incidentally themselves by destroying Christ, and afterwards His disciples. A little later the Roman Emperors, finding that the Christians refused to be absorbed into the Imperial system, and that their intolerant zeal, combined with the purity of their morals, made it impossible to beguile them either by the Stoic sense of duty or by the Epicurean pleasures of the flesh, from the contemplation of their revolutionary ideals, also took refuge in the policy of persecution. It was the same motive that, centuries later, prompted the Conservative Church itself, when faced with the Liberal influences of the Reformation, to resort to the horrors of the Inquisition. The invasion of France by the allied Powers of Europe after

the Revolution, and the Siberian prisons of the Russian Czars are other forms which the instinct of Conservative self-preservation has assumed.

But there are more subtle methods of defence than persecution and extermination. The attitude of Constantine the Great was more dangerous to the Liberal spirit of Christianity than that of Nero. He saw the value to the State of a system of ethics that preached a high standard of public and private virtue, and enforced that system by insisting upon complete obedience. The Emperors were well accustomed to the political uses of superstition; they had often created themselves gods and employed their divinity to increase their power over the pagan world. The pure teaching of Christ had seemed to offer no political advantage to the Imperial idea; on the contrary, it conflicted essentially with the Imperial policy and could not be combined with it. But the organized Church, with Aaron at its head, was a very different story, and Constantine saw that there was room for a new Moses to complete the theocracy. He proposed to be that Moses : by signs and wonders and dreams he installed himself as the divine leader of Christianity, and at the same time made himself master of the temporal policy of the Church.

After the conversion of Constantine, Christianity ceased to be a revolutionary portent;

it was safely attached to the State, and became as Conservative an institution as the State itself. In the same way Karl Marx was far more dangerous to Democracy than William Pitt. He, too, attempted to stifle the Liberal spirit of Democracy by harnessing it to the State, by handing over its direction to officials, and by constructing around it the barbed-wire defences of systematized organization. Both Constantine and Karl Marx shared the Conservative desire to seize a Liberal idea that appeared to contain the elements of liberty, and to transform it into an efficient implement of control.

It is clear, therefore, that the fundamental basis of what we call Conservatism is a refusal to believe in progress combined with a determination to prevent its taking place. It is the exact contrary to the Liberal belief in progress, in an ever-increasing measure of liberty.

The idea of Liberty is not a new one; not invented by John Stuart Mill. It is not even the child of the French Revolution. It is, indeed, the most primitive of human desires, and the earliest recorded political movements of history are concerned with the endeavour to obtain it or to refuse it. Liberty is fundamentally the desire for the free expression of individuality, whether personally or nationally, and the liberal mind is the mind that places

that desire first in moral and political importance, and admits its pre-eminent rights. The Conservative mind in its opposition to liberty maintains that liberty is wasteful and chaotic, and that a complicated world cannot be efficiently run if free play is given to the infinite variety of individuals. The Liberal, on the other hand, maintains that the orderly rules of a logical system stultify the mind and heart of humanity, and that the finest results of the human spirit have always been and can only be produced by the free mind of the individual or the nation working amid the chaos. The conflict of these two temperaments can be observed even in so primitive an institution as that of the family, where the parent has almost invariably stood for the theory of efficiency, for order, habit, and obedience, for the systematized arrangement and manipulation of education, opinion, and belief, and the child for the theory of liberty, for inquiry into the established, for curiosity about the unaccustomed, and for revolt against convention. I do not mean, of course, that the young are always liberal and the old always conservative, but youth, not necessarily of years, but often of mind, is undoubtedly an element in this persistent clash of outlook. Just as young people are more apt to be liberal and to believe in liberty than old ones, so are young nations and young civilizations compared

with the old ones, and young ideas like young people are apt to harden and grow more conservative as they grow older. Some people never lose their youthfulness of vision; some nations, like the Greeks and the English, would rather die than lose their belief in liberty; others, like the Romans and the Germans, solidify easily into efficiency. But the classification of temperament remains invariable, so invariable that it can be made the test of all political institutions and propositions.

Man is not born free as Rousseau believed; on the contrary, his effort has been, and still is, to obtain freedom both from those laws of nature and those laws of man that endeavour to control him. Modern anthropology has taught us the fallacy of primeval freedom. The bitter wit of Voltaire anticipated our views of the absurdity of that theory when he said that the writings of Rousseau "made one long to walk on all fours." Mankind was not born free, has never been free, and is not free. What is the test of freedom? How can we tell if we are free? The only way of knowing whether we are free is to contrast the freedom of our political condition with some real freedom. We know that, since the Reformation, our thought has been free. Before the appearance of Luther in 1520 the control of the State over the minds of men varied greatly from age to age in inten