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Theodore Roosevelt
Published by Good Press, 2021
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This last attitude, the dislike of revolution, was entirely wholesome and praiseworthy. On the other hand, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which represented the extreme form of loyalty to the sovereign, was vicious, unworthy of the race, and to be ranked among degrading superstitions. It is now so dead that it is easy to laugh at it; but it was then a real power for evil. Moreover, the extreme zealots who represented the opposite pole of the political and religious world, were themselves, as is ordinarily the case with such extremists, the allies of the forces against which they pretended to fight. From these dreamers of dreams, of whose “cloistered virtue” Milton spoke with such fine contempt, the men who possessed the capacity to do things turned contemptuously away, seeking practical results rather than theoretical perfection, and being content to get the substance at some cost of form. As always, the men who counted were those who strove for actual achievement in the field of practical politics, and who were not misled merely by names. England, in the present century, has shown how complete may be the freedom of the individual under a nominal monarchy; and the Dreyfus incident in France would be proof enough, were any needed, that despotism of a peculiarly revolting type may grow rankly, even in a republic, if there is not in its citizens a firm and lofty purpose to do justice to all men and guard the rights of the weak as well as of the strong.
James came to the throne to rule over a people steadily growing to think more and more seriously of religion: to believe more and more in their rights and liberties. But the King himself was cursed with a fervent belief in despotism, and an utter inability to give his belief practical shape in deeds. For half a century the spirit of sturdy independence had been slowly growing among Englishmen. Elizabeth governed almost under the forms of despotism; but a despotism which does not carry the sword has to accommodate itself pretty thoroughly to the desires of the subjects, once these desires become clearly defined and formulated. Elizabeth never ventured to do what Henry had done. She left England, therefore, thoroughly Royalist, devoted to the Crown, and unable to conceive of any other form of government, but already desirous of seeing an increase in the power of the people as expressed through Parliament. James, from the very outset of his reign, pursued a course of conduct exactly fitted both to irritate the people, with the pretensions of the Crown, and to convince them that they could prevent these pretensions from being carried out.
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