Principles of western civilisation

114 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

lightened self-interest of the individual in the existing political State.

When the period of the French Revolution is reached, great progress, it may be observed, has been already made in the direction in which this development is proceeding. To all outward appearance, it is still the principles of the English revolutionists of the seventeenth century which are everywhere dominant in Western thought. That men are born free, equal, and independent, and in possession of certain inherent and inalienable rights, has become a universal assumption. Locke's principles have influenced in every direction the work of the Encyclopzdists in France. In the hands of Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, and others, they have been used with far-reaching effect against the old order of things in France. They have crossed the Atlantic, and have become associated with the spirit of government throughout English-speaking America. They are expressed in a declaration—soon to be repeated in the constitutions of other American States—of the ‘Bill of Rights” of Virginia in 1776; in the Declaration of American Independence of the same year ;~ and they constitute the central principles of the French Revolution as set forth in the Declarations of 1791 and 1793.”

Yet if we look beneath all the outward similarity of words and forms, we may perceive that, on the continent of Europe, a clearly defined process of

1 Cf Ritchie’s Watural Rights, c. i.; Bryce’s American Commonwealth, vol. i. c. Xxxvil.

2 Macdonald’s Select Documents Illustrative of the History of the Untted States, No. I.

3 See Paine’s Rights of Man ; Dictionnaire de la Révolution ; and Ritchie’s Natural Rights, Appendix.