France, "freedom was forsaken;" "a thing for which it is said that no one
any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to me, perceive that,
as in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a
religion or religions, which are free themselves, and which teach men to
be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is,
reverence for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be
slaves.

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see;
who will say: "If religion be the pillar of political and social order,
there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse
to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man
and God. The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and
tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to
do its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to
enslave the soul."

And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the
poet says:

It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.




LECTURE II--CENTRALISATION


The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase
of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms. The