" like
Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II, who adopted the ruling
principle of the Welfare-State--that the object of government should
be the good of the people--but considered that it could only be
carried out for the people, not by them. The weakness of the principle
consisted in the difficulty of securing a heritable succession of
capable benevolence, and the collapse of Prussia at Jena and of Joseph
II's well-meant but unreflective reforms led, in the nineteenth
century, to the triumph of the principle first enunciated in America
and carried out in France--of government for the people by the people.
The transition to the next stage, from religious toleration to
religious liberty, is marked, as regards the Jews, by the tolerance
edict of Joseph II, in 1781, which for the first time threw open
service in the army to the Jews and placed them to some extent on the
same level with other dissenters from the State-Church of Austria.

But this was still toleration and not liberty, and it was soon cast
into the background by the full religious liberty granted by the
French Revolution in 1791, in imitation of the American constitution
of 1787, which entirely separated State and Church. The granting of
full religious liberty to the Jews had previously been advocated by
Mirabeau, and though Rousseau's influence, which was all-important in
the Revolution, still retained a touch of Genevan intolerance, Jews
came within his religious requirements for citizenship by their belief
in Providence and in future rewards and punishment. It has to be
remembered that in spirit, if not in will-power or influence, Louis
XVI was of the school of the benevolent despots, and it was he who
signed the edict of November 13, 1791, which for the first time in
European history placed Jews on the same level as the adherents of all
other creeds as regards civil and political qualifications. Holland
was appropriately the first country to grant the same religious
equality to its Jews.[B]

The French Revolution, from our present standpoint, is the more
remarkable inasmuch as it is the only great European movement on which
Jews had absolutely no influence, direct or indirect, owing to their
inappreciable numbers and insecure position in the chief centers,
Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. The Revolution principles spread into
the neighboring countries with the advance of the French arms. In
Venice, the walls of the original Ghetto, from which all the rest