Excerpt from A History of Modern Liberty, Vol. 3

This second instalment of my "History of Modern Liberty" is concerned with the struggle with the Stuarts in England and Scotland in the seventeenth century. It is the continuation of the attempt, exemplified in the two volumes already published, to trace the historical development of liberty throughout the modern age. In the first of these volumes I strove to elucidate the origins and results of that movement in behalf of political, municipal, and social emancipation in the Middle Ages which forms an indispensable introduction to the subject. In the second I dealt, more particularly, with the movements in favour of intellectual and religious emancipation, known as the Renascence and the Reformation, and, more generally, with their actual or potential political and social effects.

In accordance with the method of historic sequence which I have adopted, the transition from the Renascence and the Reformation to the struggle with the Stuarts in the seventeenth century forms the natural continuation of the subject. It was in this struggle that the forces making for human emancipation, already exemplified in the preceding centuries, especially in the sixteenth, were most fully illustrated for the time being. It was in England and Scotland, rather than in France, or Germany, or Italy, not to mention Spain, that the impulse to political, religious, and intellectual liberty, imparted by that century, found its most powerful, if not its exclusive expression. The age of the Renascence and the Reformation had, indeed, achieved great things in behalf of political, and especially of religious and intellectual liberty.

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