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The Crimes of England by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
page 30 of 95 (31%)

It may be held, therefore, that there must in any case have come a
conflict between the old world and the new; if only because the old are
often broad, while the young are always narrow. The Church had learnt,
not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral
of God is always a premature burial. If the bugles of Bonaparte raised
the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more
revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.
But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic
on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,
there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and
from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.
Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them
had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had
any real moral reason for being in the war at all. The first was
England, and the second was Prussia.

It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep
her influence on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally
arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French
Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the
same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no
necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental
tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was
indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the
middle classes were those which had already made America, and were
remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the
liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,
as in Russia or La Vendée. The parson was no longer a priest, and had
long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had
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