Part 22

As to what the experience of a great revolution does to the society that experiences it, we cannot conclude here too widely without trespassing on wider fields of history and sociology. Yet it does seem that the patient emerges stronger in some respects from the conquered fever, immunized in this way and that from attacks that might be more serious. It is an observable fact that in all our societies there was a certain flourishing, a peak of varied cultural achievements, after the revolutions. Certainly we may not moralize too much about the stupidities and cruelties of revolutions, may not lift up our hands in horror. It is quite possible that wider study would show that feeble and decadent societies do not undergo revolutions, that revolutions are, perversely, a sign of strength and youth in societies.

Certainly one quiet person emerges from his study, not indeed untouched by a good deal of horror and disgust, but moved also with admiration for a deep and unfathomable strength in men which, because of the softer connotations of the word, he is reluctant to call spiritual. Montaigne saw and felt it long ago: “I see not one action, or three, or a hundred, but a commonly accepted state of morality so unnatural, especially as regards inhumanity and treachery, which are to me the worst of all sins, that I have not the heart to think of them without horror; and they excite my wonder almost as much as my detestation. The practice of these egregious villainies has as much the mark of strength and vigor of soul as of error and disorder.”

Berkman the anarchist, who loathes the Russian revolution, tells a story which may represent merely his own bias, but which may none the less serve as a brief symbolical epilogue to this study. Berkman says he asked a good Bolshevik acquaintance during the period of attempted complete communization under Lenin why the famous Moscow cabmen, the izvoschiks, who continued in diminished numbers to flit about Moscow and to get enormous sums in paper roubles for their services, were not nationalized like practically everything else. The Bolshevik replied, “We found that if you don’t feed human beings they continue to live somehow. But if you don’t feed the horses, the stupid beasts die. That’s why we don’t nationalize the cabmen.” That is not an altogether cheerful story, and in some ways one may regret the human capacity to live without eating. But clearly if we were as stupid--or as sensible--as horses we should have no revolutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

The following bibliography is not intended to be a scholarly one. It does not even include all the somewhat varied sources which have gone into this study of revolutions. It is intended solely as a guide to individuals or groups who may wish to attempt the difficult but rewarding study of revolutions. As such, it is merely suggestive, but it is complete enough so that anyone using all the leads these books and their bibliographies offer would soon find himself very completely immersed in the subject.

I. Historical Writing on the Four Revolutions

The first part of this bibliography aims to introduce the reader to some of the best-known historical writing about the four revolutions with which we are here concerned. Some of the later and not yet tested writing on these periods will also be included. But here least of all could anything like completeness be attempted. A full bibliography of French history alone from 1750 to 1815 would list books enough to fill a library; at a guess, including pamphlets and articles in periodicals, there would be well over three hundred thousand titles. Writings on the Russian revolution are already almost as numerous, and even more varied. The reader will simply find in these books an opportunity to check the supply of facts from which we have attempted to discover uniformities in the course of our revolutions.

A. ENGLAND

Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism. London, 1930. A belated but useful translation of the famous revisionist’s Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution which appeared in German before the war. This is a necessary correction to the purely political and conventional interests of Gardiner, and even of Firth.

L. F. Brown, The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men in England during the Interregnum. Washington, 1912.

C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England. 3rd edition. London, 1924. The great work of our generation on Cromwell.

S. R. Gardiner, A History of England, 1603-1642; A History of the Great Civil War, 1642-1649; A History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1656. Various editions and volumes. The whole work is usually in some 17 volumes. This is the “classic” history of the period, written in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is a sound but rather dull political history, but it does not touch at all on much that would interest us in the fields of economic, social, and intellectual history.

G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century. 2nd edition with notes and appendices by H. J. Laski. Cambridge, England, 1927. Indispensable.

H. J. C. Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. London, 1929. Excellent intellectual history.

T. C. Pease, The Leveller Movement. Washington, 1916. A very useful monograph, especially as a corrective to Bernstein’s socialistic view of Lilburne and the Levelers.

L. von Ranke, A History of England principally in the Seventeenth Century. English translation, London, 1875. Another classic of narrative history.

G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts. New York, 1930. Perhaps the best of our modern manuals, though distinctly in the traditions of pleasant British liberalism, which are always a bit shocked by the facts of revolution. This book has a convenient bibliography.

B. AMERICA

C. W. Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics. 2 vols. Cleveland, 1917. An important monograph opening up an important field neglected in earlier studies of the American revolution.

C. M. Andrews, Colonial Background of the American Revolution. New Haven, 1924.

C. L. Becker, The Eve of the Revolution (Vol. 11 of the Chronicles of America). New Haven, 1921. The Declaration of Independence. New York, 1922. Both these books bring to the study of political change a rare and thorough knowledge of how men think and feel.

G. L. Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754-1756. New York, 1907. The last volume of a thorough monographic treatment of the old British Empire, especially with respect to matters of trade and taxation.

B. Faÿ, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and in the United States. English translation, New York, 1927. Extremely valuable for the study of ideas.

J. F. Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. Princeton, 1926. Suggestive, and in many ways a pioneer essay. But a long and thorough monograph with the same title would be useful. Recent Marxist attempts to do something of the sort have not amounted to much.

J. C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda. Boston, 1936. One of the best studies of revolutionary propaganda and technique available for any revolution.

A. M. Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution. New York, 1918. This monograph brought the realistic study of the American revolution a tremendous leap forward.

G. O. Trevelyan, The American Revolution. George III and Charles James Fox, the concluding part of The American Revolution. Bound with the above in a uniform edition of 6 vols., New York, 1920-1922. This is a “classic” with the overtones of being dated which the word often carries. Written by a distinguished Whig historian, it is more favorable to American “rights” in the War of Independence than most of the foregoing American books. It seems to our generation to omit very important economic and social considerations.

M. C. Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution. 2 vols. New York, 1897. Also a “classic” but not by any means dated.