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Updated: June 3, 2025
So it has been with Protestantism, the constitutionalism of Christianity. The Huguenots at one time constituted a great power in France; but despotism in politics and religion proved too strong for them, and they were persecuted, banished, and stamped for a time out of existence, or at least out of sight. Protestantism was more successful in Germany.
To be sure, Stephens was an extreme instance of the martinet of constitutionalism. He reminds us of those old-fashioned generals of whom Macaulay said that they preferred to lose a battle according to rule than win it by an exception. Such men find it easy to transform into a bugaboo any one who appears to them to be acting irregularly. Stephens in his own mind had so transformed the President.
The enemy of constitutionalism and freedom everywhere, she was especially hostile to their existence in the little state that bordered on a portion of her Italian possessions, whence they always threatened Lombardy with a plague she detests far more heartily than she detests cholera. No natural boundary or cordon militaire could suffice to stay the march of principles.
"When bad men combine," wrote Edmund Burke, "the good must associate, else they will fall one by one an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." No one can accuse Burke the apostle of constitutionalism, the arch-enemy of the French revolution of condoning violence, but even he admitted that there is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
He came, a Scotsman, to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism.
The constitutionalism and nationalism of the North figured in argument as indifference to slavery, the steps taken towards, the emancipation of slaves as mere hypocritical stratagems of war, and the climax of disingenuousness was reached when the anti-conscription and anti-negro riots of New York were fastened upon that very war-party against which they had been levelled.
In Bailly, the astronomer whom unhappy chance had made Mayor of Paris, constitutionalism recognized a man after its own heart. The majority of the members of the National Assembly seemed to be gloriously occupied in evolving out of the chaos of the old order a new and entirely admirable framework of laws modelled boldly after the English pattern.
At a great dinner given in his honour, that ruthless administrator of the old Muscovite type, who had systematically opposed the emancipation of the serfs and had never concealed his contempt for the Liberal ideas in fashion, could ironically express his satisfaction at seeing around him so many "new friends"! This revulsion of public feeling gave the Moscow Slavophils an opportunity of again preaching their doctrine that the safety and prosperity of Russia were to be found, not in the Liberalism and Constitutionalism of Western Europe, but in patriarchal autocracy, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other peculiarities of Russian nationality.
Nevertheless, when Smith urged the Virginia Legislature to assume control of business as a temporary measure, he was at once assailed by the second group those martinets of constitutionalism who would not give up their cherished Anglo-Saxon tradition of complete individualism in government.
It is only now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is. The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy. Illiberal at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against the holy alliance.
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