Democracy and liberty Book

Along with a thorough discussion of British, French, and American democracy and 19th century land acts, the author also discusses aspects of religious liberty and democracy throughout the world. The work covers American Democracy, reform, attacks on property, democracy as an inevitable fact, Upper Chambers, taxation and its causes, proposals for reforming the House of Lords, Mormonism, religious liberty, Catholicism and democracy in Ireland, Socialism, working practices, emancipation, and more. Excerpt from Democracy and Liberty, Vol. 2 There is one other subject connected with religious liberty that is likely to occupy a large share in the at tention of the democracies of the future. It is the position and the aggressive policy of the Catholic Church. Of all the judgments of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, none have been more sig nally falsified than those which they formed of the future of the Catholic Church. With scarcely an ex ception, they believed that its sacerdotal, superstitious, intolerant, and ultramontane elements were silently fading away; that it was taking more and more the character of a purely moralising influence; and that all danger of antagonism between it and the civil power had passed for ever. The delusion lasted for several years after the French Revolution, and it may be very clearly traced in the speeches and writings of the chief advocates of Catholic Emancipation. Many of them lived to acknowledge their mistake. There is a cha racteristically cynical saying attributed to Lord Mel bourne, that on that question all the d d fools in England predicted one set of things, and all the sensi ble men in England another set, and that the d - d fools proved perfectly right, and the sensible men per fectly wrong.'