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Just so far as we can recognize the ordinary modes of operation of the common forces of nature, gravity, cohesion, elasticity, transudation, chemical action, and the rest, we see the so-called vital acts in the light of a larger range of known facts and familiar analogies.
Of literary ability of a good and serviceable kind there is a hundred or five hundred times more in the country than there was when Jeffrey, Smith, Brougham, and Horner devised their Review in a ninth storey in Edinburgh seventy-six years ago. It is the cohesion of a political creed that is gone, and the strength and fervour of a political school.
Charlemagne had not to grapple with one single nation or with one single system of institutions; he had to deal with different nations, without cohesion, and foreign one to another. The authority belonged, at one and the same time, to assemblies of free men, to landholders over the dwellers on their domains, and to the king over the "leudes" and their following.
It is precisely because the Catholic Church alone possesses such a supreme and infallible authority that she alone is able to present to the world that which follows directly from it, namely a complete unity and cohesion within her own borders. Yes! Strange to say: the Catholic Church to-day stands alone! There is no rival to dispute with her, her unique and peerless position.
It is combated by selfishness, greed, ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion among themselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before the advance of the higher spirit. Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge, growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness.
Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the European nations have been working towards democracy by means of a completer national organization; while this country has been working towards national cohesion by the mere logic and force of its democratic ideal.
Certainly we have no right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any enemy States to be considered. But what do we mean by Progress?
Whatever may have been the cause of the delay, it is certain that the golden fruit of victory was not plucked, and that although the confederate army had rapidly dissolved, in consequence of their defeat, the king's own forces manifested as little cohesion.
It appears evident, that customary law was the will of small communities, when they were sovereign; that the cohesion of such communities was a confirmation of such customs of each, that the election of a monarch or a parliament was a recognition of these customs, and that the moral and material FORCE or power of the sovereign was the outcome of existing laws, and a confirmation thereof.
It would have split them up into various parties, rivals for favour and the power derived from favour. The bishops of each country would have had national interests controlling their actions. The Teuton invaders were without power of cohesion, without fraternal affection for each other; their ephemeral territories were in a state of perpetual fluctuation.