. . . Since the historical antecedents and the existing conditions, the spirit and the customs, of the various nations were diverse, these demands differed in the several countries, as to order of appearance, as to magnitude, as to details, and as to their general tone. . . . But though these demands were different in importance and in order of appearance, they were all linked in a single chain, and sooner or later one drew another along after itself, and brought to light still others that could be seen in the distance. And over all of them rose one word that summed them all up and expressed the spirit which had given them life--the word liberty.

To be sure, it was not a new word in history. . . . [But] the word was spoken by the younger generation with the emotional emphasis of those who have just discovered an idea of vital importance, one illuminating the past and the present, [and] a guide for the future.

The novelty of the idea with which that old, old, old word was filled did not escape either the feeling or the thought of the people of [the nineteenth century]. . . . [For whom the problem] concerned the difference in character between the liberty suited to the modern world and that of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Jacobins of yesterday. This problem was propounded and discussed for the first time--or almost the first--by Benjamin Constant, in an address he gave in 1819 before the Athénée of Paris, and it has been discussed many times from that day to ours. But though the problem [as discussed then] had its kernel of reality, it was not presented correctly when a contrast was made between the ancient and the modern, in which Greece, Rome, and the French Revolution (as following the Graeco-Roman ideals) stood on one side, and on the other [stood] the modern world--as if the present were not the point where all the streams of history flow together and history's last act, and as if a single continuous development could be broken by a static opposition. In consequence, the investigation that was based on the supposed contrast ran the risk of being lost in abstractions, separating . . . the liberty of one man and that of all other men which limits his own. . . . This error of abstraction always reappears when the attempt is made to define the idea of liberty abstractly by juridical distinctions, which are practical in character and concern single and transitory institutions rather than the superior and supreme idea that embraces them all and transcends them all.

. . . But [the advance of] the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth had disentangled the problem [of liberty] more clearly and almost conclusively, because it had criticized the opposition--acute in eighteenth-century rationalism and the French Revolution--between reason and history, in which history had been degraded and condemned by the light of reason. . . . It had made one the rationality and the reality of the new idea of history, rediscovering the saying of the philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico [1668-1744] that the republic sought for by Plato was nothing but the course of human events. . . . No longer did history appear . . . [to have been] directed by alien forces. Now it was seen to be the work and activity of the [human] spirit, and . . . since spirit is liberty, [as] the work of liberty.

. . . And there is no little irony in the fact that the new spiritual attitude received its baptismal name from the least likely sponsor, the country that more than any other in Europe had been tight shut against philosophy and modern culture, a country pre-eminently mediaeval and scholastic--Spain, which at that time coined the word liberal, together with its exact antonym servil. It is therefore well to note . . . that the philosophy of an age must not be sought only among its philosophers . . . but must instead be dug out of all the manifestations of that age.

. . . the liberal ideal . . . was . . . a "religion". . . . [W]hat is essential and intrinsic in every religion . . . [is its] concept of reality and an ethics that conforms to this concept. . . .

On every side rang out the cry of a new birth, of a "century that is being born again," like a salutation full of promise to the "third age," the age of the Spirit, which Gioacchiono de Fiore had prophesied in the thirteenth century, and which now opened out before the human society that had prepared for it and waited for it.

This religion of the new era found its contrast and its opponents in other rival and hostile religions, which although they were expressly or virtually criticized by it and surpassed by it, counted their own believers and proselytes. . . .

The first place among them was . . . taken by the Catholicism of the Church of Rome, the most direct and logical negation of the liberal idea; that Catholicism felt itself and recognized itself to be such and wished to be so considered from the first appearance of the idea. . . . The activity of the Catholic Church, considered in its history, is either directed to the ends of civilization, . . . of the life of this world, of human progress--as can clearly be seen in her great period, when she preserved a large part of the heritage of the ancient world and defended the rights of conscience and liberty and of the life of the spirit against the barbaric peoples and against the materialistic tyranny of emperors and kings--or else, when she loses that function or at least the leadership which she has held in it and is overcome by the civilization which she has herself collaborated in creating, she shrinks to being a guardian of decrepit and dead forms, of lack of culture, of ignorance, of superstition, of spiritual oppression, and becomes in her turn more or less materialistic.

History, which is the history of liberty, proves to be stronger than this doctrine or this programme; it defeats it. . . .

[But t]he experience of the French Revolution and of the others that followed had created a disgust for republics, and the example of the [Austro-Hungarian] Empire had given new life to the monarchical system. The monarchies were therefore still capable of history, and of satisfying the needs of the nations that asked for representation and participation in the government, of undertaking or of completing the unification of the state, capable of giving greatness to the nations and life to their aspirations. And the liberal ideal was prepared to breathe its spirit into them, thereby giving the best proof of that disposition which led it to combine the future with the past, the new with the old, and to maintain the continuity of history by preventing the dispersion of institutions and tendencies so painfully acquired. But instead of a Holy Alliance of independent and free nations . . . appeared . . . a conglomerate of absolute monarchies, in part formed by inheritance and including several nations, and in part fragments of nations. The promises and the hopes that were burning the breasts of those who fought against the Napoleonic hegemony and despotism were not kept and not put into effect when the danger was past; and almost everywhere the restored monarchies had begun the defensive and the offensive against the old ally and the new enemy, national patriotism and the liberalism that animated and was animated by it. On the side of the monarchies stood retrograde and reactionary forces, the courtiers, the nobility, and the semi-feudal classes, the priesthood, the riff-raff of the city and the country, and, above all, the power which every established government has because of the simple fact that it is established. . . .

The problem was to persuade or to force the absolute monarchies to become constitutional, to take the step they objected to, to escape from the contradictory situation to which they clung, since . . . they could neither go back to the enlightened monarchies of the eighteenth century nor further back, where the aristocrats would gladly have pushed them, to the semi-feudal and nobiliary monarchies; nor could they adopt in full the procedure of the Napoleonic absolutism. . . . And so they were reduced to jumbling together as best they might the old and the new, and to binding them together by means of the police, the censorship, and severe repression.

Such are the oppositions, either already formed or taking form, which liberalism found on its path at its rise or during its first steps. . . .