and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the
world.

Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in
government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay
the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could
give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a
thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the
absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was
fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of
the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the
misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a
splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed
in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of
the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.

The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with
it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of
operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the
creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of
the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same _milieu_ that was
responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain
of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and
finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at
the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the
same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in