sity, from the light reign of the Roman Pontifex Maximus and Censor to the iron hand of the Spanish Inquisition. It is easy to see how the illusion of liberty arises from time to time. During the terrible persecutions in Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries men must have looked across the Mediterranean with envy to the comparative immunity of Italy, where, whatever their political despotism may have been, the Viscontis of Milan, the Medicis of Florence, and the Doges of Venice were permitting their subjects to bathe in the glorious sunshine of the Renaissance. Yet we know that the Italy of the Renaissance was only comparatively, not really, free to think as it pleased. In 1498, six years after the death of that fine flower of the Renaissance, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Savonarola was condemned by the Pope to die for daring to preach a religious revival and a return to purity of manners. But since the Reformation we know that we are really free. We can think what we like and say what we like, and no man can prevent us. When it is really obtained, and is not merely comparative, freedom is unmistakable. But, though this unmistakable political freedom has never existed, men, owing to the variations in the strength of the control over them, have often thought themselves free. The Romans who suffered under the degraded tyranny of

Caligula looked back on the close aristocratic control of the Senate in the age of Cato as to a golden age of freedom. Conservative revolutions all through history have been looked upon, often merely because revolution of any sort entails radical change, as an advance towards liberty. We shall have to examine this illusion of revolution later on; it must suffice now to say that even the despotism of Napoleon appeared to his marshals an age of wonderful liberty. Man has never been free, he has only been comparatively free. And man is not free now. No one will deny that under Democracy men are comparatively more free than they were under other forms of government. Hobbes was wrong when he said that Monarchy was a better form of government than Democracy, so wrong that his opinion has stultified his influence. But he was more nearly right when he said that the struggle of his time was a struggle for power and not for liberty.

In a world, therefore, which never has been and is not free, the acid test of political change is whether that change is a tendency towards liberty or not. Democracy, when it arose and overthrew Monarchy, had that tendency, even though it was a transfer of power.

Socialism, on the other hand, if it ever arises and overthrows Democracy, will not be a Liberal revolution, but a Conservative reaction,

because it contains no tendency towards liberty whatever.

The world, therefore, in spite of wars, coalitions, and other disturbing phenomena, is still a place where some men want to go forward towards freedom, and others regard such progress as impossible. The former are Liberals, and all the miasma of class conflict and the fog of party warfare cannot prevent them from holding their place in political life. The ephemeral labels that mental confusion encourages us to attach to the struggling atoms around us are of small consequence. The Republicans contest bitterly with the Democrats in the United States; in England a body of men may call themselves Labour, and another may call themselves National. But even the mental agility of a Welsh Wizard cannot permanently disguise the realities of psychology. In America the Republican is really a Conservative, and the Democrat a Liberal. In England the Labour man, if he believes in Socialism, is at heart the most reactionary of Conservatives. It may seem strange, perhaps incredible, but even the deep political thought and the profound statesmanship that we know to be so characteristic of our political leaders, has not yet shaken seriously the Darwinian theory of evolution.

CHAPTER II

THE STATIC STATE

THE Conservative denial of progress may seem a cold and unsatisfactory creed, unlikely to hold men by its appeal either to their energies or their passions. The sanguine optimism of the Liberal, who said that man would find a way to prevent the sun from getting cool, is contrasted with the unenthusiastic pessimism of Mr. Balfour, who is supposed to have said that he believed there had once been an ice age, and that he believed that some day there would be another. But it is an illusion to imagine that the denial of progress is a creed that brings no fervour to its devotees, that produces no passion other than a nerveless and apathetic cynicism. For the denial of progress is merely the framework of the clean slate. Having swept away with a gesture of contempt the theory of evolution; having convinced oneself that mankind has not changed and will not change; it remains for the superior person to draw up rules for this hopeless and otherwise

unmanageable mob of humanity. The drawing up of rules is, at least for those who draw them up, the most engrossing of pursuits. Those who indulge in this sinister form of occupation obtain some part of the sensation of vast superiority that the schoolmaster feels for his pupils. They can put their contempt into intellectual form; they can combine a quantity of sensual pleasures; the conception of a rounded and definite idea, the exercise of authority, the sensation of patronage, of virtue and good works. It is these physical and intellectual delights that have in all ages tempted the philosopher, the bureaucrat, and the statesman to build on the foundation of a denial of progress the monstrous temple of the Static State.

It is obvious that, progress once denied, it is logically possible to evolve a system that need never be altered, and can remain a permanent instrument for the government of a naughty world. Man being, as Hobbes thought, a base creature, and as his baseness could be presumed to be permanent, it only remains to construct a permanent system to keep him in order. If the Conservative premise is once granted, the Static State follows logically and inevitably, and free play is given to the tyrannical instincts of the superior mind.

The laws of Moses cover every conceivable department of human life. Many of them still