This rather abrupt
twist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power,
certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile it
was being weakened by heavy blows from without.
There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that was
the turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolution
faltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberal
ideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While the
new foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damaging
democracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings,
were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemed
that the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombined
against France. But there was just this difference: that the Holy
Alliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.
It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny the
dignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope of
denying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was
Protestant and probably religious.
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