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The growth of royal power consequently acted most curiously on contemporary thinkers. It meant centralisation, the setting up of a definite force which should control the whole kingdom. It resulted in absolutism increasing, with an ever-widening sphere of royal control.
Such was the first great step in the political revolution of Japan. It was followed by another and still greater one, an act without a parallel in the history of autocratic governments. This was the voluntary relinquishment of absolutism by the emperor, the calling together of a parliament, and the adoption of a representative government on the types of those of the West.
Sovereigns who were often molested by the Pope could as a rule only look favourably upon a doctrine which added religious powers to their political powers and made each of them a Pope. Far from diminishing the absolutism of rulers, the Reformation only exaggerated it. Rational value of the doctrines of the Reformation.
On the one hand is the gross and unrestrained tyranny of what in modern phrase is styled Imperialism, and on the other a wise and benevolent modification of temporal sovereignty in the interests of all by an established and accepted spiritual power. No middle path lies before the people of Europe. Temporal absolutism we must have.
But the institutions of three other European nations were for considerable periods dominant in certain parts of the New World, and have left an impress that is even yet far from being effaced. They are those of Spain, France, and Holland. Since the Indies were, in theory, an outlying part of the kingdom of Castile, they naturally reflected the recently achieved absolutism of the Spanish monarchy.
There, no doubt, absolutism had emerged in opposition to the old constitution, which to some extent recognized different estates; but sovereign and subject by no means stood towards each other in Macedonia as they stood in Asia and Egypt, and the people still felt itself independent and free.
He was a Puritan, and hence he was a reformer, not in church matters merely, but in all those things which are connected with civil liberty, for there is as close a connection between Protestantism and liberty as between Catholicism and absolutism.
Gladstone in the cause of a possible laying of too heavy a rod upon England's back, and had recommended his erratic son to let the barbarism of absolutism alone in the future, and try his genius upon that of democracy.
Absolutism with all its assumed divine prerogatives, in the person of the Czar, had declared its firm will "to grant the people the unshakable foundations of civic freedom on the basis of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, of speech, of assemblage and of unions." This civic freedom Absolutism had sanctioned.
The time was to come, in spite of the military enthusiasm of his veteran soldiers, when it was to be proved that the throne of absolutism is better sustained by love than by mechanism. Napoleon had already elevated his two brothers, Louis and Joseph, to the thrones of Holland and Naples. He now sought to make his brother Joseph the King of Spain.
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