



Produced by David Widger






LIBERTY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By Frederic May Holland

1899

BY

PREFACE

THIS book is a result of having studied the development of political
and religious liberty for forty years. How well I have selected
my authorities the reader can judge. I will merely say that I have
mentioned no writer whom I have not studied carefully. The sun-dial has
been so far my model that victories in the cause of freedom are more
prominent than defeats in the pages that follow. It did not seem
necessary to give much space to familiar authors, though I should have
liked to do justice to Buckle, George Eliot, and Swinburne.

I regret that I have been unable to tell at any adequate length how the
Republic which was proclaimed at Paris in 1870 has survived longer than
any other government set up in France during the century. Its enemies
have been voted down repeatedly everywhere; the schools have been made
free from ecclesiastical control; and the hostility of the clergy has
been suppressed by the Pope. The French are still too fond of military
glory, and too ignorant of the value of personal liberty and local
self-government; but rapid advance in freedom is already possible under
the Constitution of 1884. Not only France, but also Great Britain,
Canada, and Australia, give proof that the time has gone by when
Americans had any right to claim, as they did in my boyhood, to be the
only people able to govern themselves.

If any nation can maintain a free press, just laws, and elections of
local magistrates, it ought to enjoy these rights, however slight may
be its fitness for becoming a real republic; and the suppression of such
rights by Cromwell and Napoleon cannot be pardoned consistently by any
friend to liberty. Napoleon's chief guilt, as I must here mention,
was in ordering the expulsion from office by soldiers, in 1797, of
representatives of