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which it was desirable that the Government should not know, such as the attendance at Mass or the numbers of communicants, but the ordinary information regarding the state of the churches, the work of the clergy, the extent of the appropriation of ecclesiastical property by the Protestants, and the various internal troubles in the respective dioceses, is very complete, and affords an abundance of matter for diocesan historians.

Following the Relationes Status, there is published a report, in three recensions, of the state of Ireland in 1580, probably from the hand of Dermot O'Hurley, subsequently Archbishop of Cashel. This document gives a very full description of the Irish Church, with special mention of the men whose zeal for religion brought persecution upon them. A list is supplied of operarii insignes in Ireland, and another of clergy outside of Ireland, whose learning and piety fit them for the laborious and dangerous duties of the Irish Mission.

Finally, we are furnished, from the Acta Consistorialia, with a list of episcopal appointments during the period 1559-91; of these there are over forty, together with the authority granting the pallium to the Archbishops on their appointment, and the deprivation of Miler Magrath (1580) on account of heresy.

From the Secretary's report, published in the last volume of Archivium Hibernicum, we learn that, notwithstanding recent illness, Dr. Hagan is continuing the magnificent work for the Catholic Record Society which has already made its journal so valuable. It is only those who have themselves been engaged similarly that can realize the enormous labour which such a task as his entails, and therefore he will have the unmeasured gratitude of every devoted student of Irish history. If he were desirous merely of attaining a reputation, Dr. Hagan might have chosen to tread some easier path to fame, and his admirers would be legion; but he prefers to devote his time and energy to the laborious task of rescuing from oblivion so many precious records of the past, spending himself, like our great annalists, 'for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.'

P. O'NEILL.

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC

REVOLUTION

AMERICA AND FRANCE1

BY PROF. J. M. O'SULLIVAN, M.A., PH.D.

III

We have seen that the abstract political dogmas on which the Revolutions in France and America professed to be based were essentially identical. Yet apparently the effects they produced or helped to produce differed considerably in the two countries. In their purely philosophic character they merit serious attention and are open to criticism. But it is not with their truth, as theories of the philosopher in his study, but with their effect as principles of action for the political leader and his followers that we are concerned here.

Their vagueness and universality, it is true, and their conformity with the whole type of thought and with the prevailing trend of political speculation in the eighteenth century secured for them a ready acceptance on the part of different peoples. But before they could become effective political forces they had to be made applicable to the definite concrete conditions of national life-and these conditions varied from country to country. The principles had to be interpreted, and each nation gave them the interpretation which accorded most with its traditions and passions, its needs and aspirations. The strength and direction of their energy depended as much, if not more, on the circumstances prevalent in the countries that adopted them, as on themselves. A lighted match thrown on the roadway has not the same significance as one dropped on a haystack or a powder mine; and if there is an explosion its destructiveness is often proportional to the amount of resistance encountered. Thus, the meaning and the bearing

1 Cf. I. E. RECORD (June and July, 1917), Fifth Series, vol. ix. pp. 441, et seq.; vol. x. pp. 27 et seq.

of one and the same formula differed with the differing circumstances of America, France, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, and Ireland.

What, then, did the principles we are considering mean in practice to the American of 1776 and to the Frenchman of 1789? To what extent did their adoption render changes inevitable, or at least, probable, in each case?

In this respect the fundamental difference between America and France was that in America the distance between the actual facts of social and political life and the ideals of the Bills of Rights was comparatively small; in France it was immense. For the former, in addition to the abolition of English control, few further changes were necessary. But in France the Declaration, if put into practice, meant an enormous break with the past, a revolution affecting every phase of political, social, fiscal, and economic life. Obviously the greater the distance that separates a country from Democracy, the greater the dislocation which is likely to follow the introduction of democratic principles; the less political and social equality exists the more profound the metamorphosis which must attend the destruction of privileges. The principles with which we are dealing were 'revolutionary, both in the America of 1776 and in the France of 1789, but the extent and force of the revolution was naturally greater in that country where autocracy and feudalism still obtained. Hence the rather peculiar phenomenon that whereas, in the nineteenth century, in France and in Europe generally the 'principles of 1789' were productive of political unrest and upheaval; in America they rather gave expression to the conservative character of her people, and with other provisions of the various constitutions acted as a barrier to sudden change and hasty legislation. It is sometimes forgotten that democratic principles are 'revolutionary' only under undemocratic and despotic governments.

Except complete sovereignty, the colonists, at the time of the revolt, had almost everything they desired. Each of the thirteen colonies had its constitution. This, in its governor and, as a rule, two houses of legislature, was modelled on the British Constitution, which the majority of the Americans at that date seem to have regarded as the last word in practical political wisdom. But these frames of government, in their passage across the Atlantic, underwent an important change of spirit. Even before 1776 there was

in America a democratic feeling which was absent from the Mother-country. That aristocratic rule which in England held sway, without opposition, except for one period of unsuccessful monarchical reaction at the beginning of the reign of George III, could find no favouring foothold in the Colonies.

On the whole, then, the colonists enjoyed not only selfgovernment, but democratic self-government. Interference on the part of the Home Government was comparatively rare, and generally in matters that did not bring it into intimate contact with the individual colonists. Two colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were more favoured still, for the governor was appointed by the colony itself, and the matters in which the Crown could intervene were strictly limited, and the intervention, even in these matters, by no means easy.

So satisfactory did these colonial constitutions, granted by various charters, appear to the leaders of American opinion in the War of Independence, that, in most cases, they served to provide the solid bases for the new institutions of the independent States. Massachusetts, the most revolutionary of the thirteen colonies, did not give itself a new Constitution till 1780, and then this new Constitution was built on the foundations of the old. Connecticut and Rhode Island went further still, and, apart from the abolition of the authority of the English Crown, maintained their old colonial Constitutions unchanged, the former until 1818, and the latter until 1842.

Thus it is clear that the rejection of British rule was far from implying any wholesale rejection of British institutions. The colonists, though determinedly hostile to what they had come to deem foreign oppression, felt it incumbent on them to distrust and abolish few of their existing political bodies. How very different the spirit of France in 1789 ! The first necessary task seemed to the 'friends of liberty to be the abolition or the diminution of those royal powers which had hitherto ruled the country. Few had the political foresight of Mirabeau. Yet in that August which saw the Declaration of the Rights of Man the chief danger to Liberty was no longer from any powers that remained in the rather nerveless hands of Louis XVI, but from the spirit of the Revolution itself and from the undue weakening of the government. The fear, however, of a counterrevolution, on the part of the king or of the nobility, prevailed, and the work of destruction continued.

But even when about to cut themselves loose from England, her American sons, despite appeals to reason and Natural Rights, in practice remained true to that characteristically English way of envisaging political change and development to which Burke has given classic expression :

An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution. . . . . The Revolution [of 1688] was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. . . . The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reverence to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. . . . You will observe from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. . . . Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. . . By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our Government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. . . . Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the State, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. . . . Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other and these no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with awful gravity. . . . We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principles upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and our privileges.1

...

The temper of the colonists in 1776 demanded a breach with the past, but they were determined to limit the extent

1 Reflections on the Revolution in France. The italics are in the original.

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