thought of
Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary
philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the
endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham.
Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but
related Manchester school had two generations of development in England,
and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative
peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era that
should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of
mankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting
through J.S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush
of its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influences
overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of
Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of
the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In this
story of political thought events have been no less potent than
arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and
defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly
brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of
those principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive steps
by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement
to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the
middle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for
autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for
blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and
very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that
reason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of social
ethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European
cataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal and
humanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reaction
against them towards the close. The causes of such a change are
multifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year
1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so that
he will find in the present war another turning-point from which a new
movement is to begin.

Be this as it may, we may rest assured that the political thought of
Europe, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward o