OF THE GOOD. 131 



has existed almost universally in this country through 

 all the changes in Church, State, and Society, which 

 have taken place. This universal and tacit respect for 

 Order which underlay the many reform movements and 

 never permitted the outbreak of a storm such as was 

 witnessed abroad, has been accompanied, in most 

 of the thoughtful minds of this country, by the tacit or 

 openly avowed conviction that there exists a natural, 

 moral, social, or divine order of the world. English 

 Ethics have interested themselves in answering the 

 questions of the nature, origin, and maintenance of this 

 Law and Order, but they have never been, to any im- 

 portant extent, occupied with laying absolutely new 

 foundations, with building afresh the edifice of State and 

 Society, and only quite recently and tentatively with 

 the formation of a philosophical or purely reasoned 

 Creed. If we now contrast the conditions which sur- 

 rounded thinkers in France at the end of the eighteenth 

 century, we find that they were confronted by one of the 

 greatest social and political experiments which history 

 has ever witnessed. The Kevolution had swept away all 

 social and religious landmarks and changed the entire 

 political aspect.^ The shallow ethical theories which 



^ " That such a revolution must through its representatives in 

 one day come, every observer who [ Parliament had been practically 



established. Social equality had 

 begun long before. Every man 

 from the highest to the lowest was 

 subject to, and protected by, the 

 same law. The English aristoc- 

 racy, though exercising a powerful 

 influence on Government, were 

 possessed of few social privileges, 

 and hindered from forming a 

 separate class in the nation by the 

 legal and social tradition which 



had compared the state of Europe 

 with that of England had long seen 

 to be inevitable. So far as England 

 was concerned, the Puritan resist- 

 ance of the seventeenth century 

 had in the end succeeded in check- 

 ing the general tendency of the 

 time to religious and political des- 

 potism. Since the Revolution of 

 1688 freedom of conscience and the 

 people's right to govern itself 



