began with vaccination in the Early Victorian Age; it extended to the
early licence of vivisection in its later age; it has found a sort of
fitting foolscap, or crown of crime and folly, in the thing called
Eugenics. In all three cases the point was not so much that the pioneers
had not proved their case; it was rather that, by an unexpressed rule of
respectability, they were not required to prove it. This rather abrupt
twist of the rationalistic mind in the direction of arbitrary power,
certainly weakened the Liberal movement from within. And meanwhile it
was being weakened by heavy blows from without.

There is a week that is the turn of the year; there was a year that was
the turn of the century. About 1870 the force of the French Revolution
faltered and fell: the year that was everywhere the death of Liberal
ideas: the year when Paris fell: the year when Dickens died. While the
new foes of freedom, the sceptics and scientists, were damaging
democracy in ideas, the old foes of freedom, the emperors and the kings,
were damaging her more heavily in arms. For a moment it almost seemed
that the old Tory ring of iron, the Holy Alliance, had recombined
against France. But there was just this difference: that the Holy
Alliance was now not arguably, but almost avowedly, an Unholy Alliance.
It was an alliance between those who still thought they could deny the
dignity of man and those who had recently begun to have a bright hope of
denying even the dignity of God. Eighteenth-century Prussia was
Protestant and probably religious. Nineteenth-century Prussia was almost
utterly atheist. Thus the old spirit of liberty felt itself shut up at
both ends, that which was called progressive and that which was called
reactionary: barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and by Darwin by
blood and bones. The enormous depression which infects many excellent
people born about this time, probably has this cause.