Principles of western civilisation

100 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

in so doing, endeavour to keep the mind entirely detached from the prejudices and prepossessions that have unavoidably become associated with it in modern thought, there will probably be little doubt or hesitation as to the point at which we must take up the study of the movement towards Democracy with which it is associated.

For the origin of that movement we shall have to go back beyond the period of the French Revolution. No one nowadays, says Borgeaud, attributes the theory of the social contract to Rousseau.’ The Revolution in France is, strictly speaking, to be regarded as no more than a local incident in a movement in Western thought which had become general, a product born at a stage when that movement had resulted, to use words of William Clarke, in ‘a general European culture common to all the thinkers of the later part of the eighteenth century —to Kant and Rousseau, to Franklin and Turgot, nay, to such Conservatives as Gibbon and Hume, and such a Welt-Kind as Goethe.”* Every article in the creed of the French Revolution, as Professor Ritchie has shown in detail,* had been already formulated in an earlier development of Western thought.

For the real origin of the movement in which Western Democracy takes its rise, we must go back to the revolution which we behold in progress in England more than a century earlier. It is here that we stand and watch the unloosening of the forces which have set in motion the modern world. “ Although no such inference could be drawn from

1 The Rise of Modern Democracy in Old and New England, by Charles Borgeaud, Member of the Faculty of Law, Geneva, c. iii.

8 Natural Rights, by David G. Ritchie, ch. i.

——IxwE~7n:an