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Updated: June 6, 2025
From his early youth he had shown a strong liking for military discipline and a decided repugnance to the humanitarianism and liberal principles then in fashion. With "the rights of man," "the spirit of the age," and similar philosophical abstractions his strong, domineering nature had no sympathy; and for the vague, loud-sounding phrases of philosophic liberalism he had a most profound contempt.
But there was a far deeper reason for my saying what I said in this matter, on which I have not hitherto touched; and it was this: The most oppressive thought, in the whole process of my change of opinion, was the clear anticipation, verified by the event, that it would issue in the triumph of Liberalism.
The interval between the two publications had been filled by a great reactionary movement among the clergy, one of the back-streams to that current of Liberalism, which setting in after the termination of the great French war, not only swept away the Rotten boroughs and the other political bulwarks of Tory dominion but threatened to sweep away the privileges of the Established Church, and compelled Churchmen to look out for a basis independent of State support.
The death of the archbishop of Paris could have been prevented, he thinks, had the Versailles authorities acted with due promptness and determination; and he avers his belief that the liberalism of that prelate made his death not unacceptable to the Church party represented now by Eugénie and MacMahon. He ascribes fanaticism also to the savior of Paris that was to be Trochu.
And after all the English Liberals could not get their own Government to risk what the French Government had risked; and Napoleon III. might well have retorted on Palmerston, his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war was better than no fighting. Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when the world
Thus, though their starting-point was different, the Benthamites arrived at practical results not notably divergent from those of the doctrine of natural liberty; and, on the whole, the two influences worked together in the formation of that school who in the reform period exercised so notable an influence on English Liberalism, and to whose work we must now turn.
As a politician, the King of Prussia finds his immediate antagonism in politics, in liberalism. For the King, the antagonism of the proletariat exists just as little as the King exists for the proletariat. The proletariat must attain to decisive power before it can extinguish antipathies and political antagonisms, and draw upon itself the whole enmity of politics.
In others, the break-up of the movement under such a chief led them on, more or less, and some very far, into a career of speculative Liberalism like that of Mr. Blanco White, the publication of whose biography coincided with Mr. Newman's change.
The mighty still sat proudly in their seats, dispensing their ancient tyranny; but a storm was gathering out of the darkness, and already there was lightning in the sky. But the vastest forces must needs operate through frail human instruments; and it seemed for many years as if the great cause of English liberalism hung upon the life of the little girl at Kensington.
Newman speaks of him with almost boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation. Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of Rome. Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had passed.
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