No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
? fl ?_ OW much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best! said Charles James Fox of the French Revolution. Charles Fox was a man of notoriously bad judgment-and I am not sure that we historians are not too generous in our estimate of the importance of revolutions. I am not speaking of their value or their merits, where bad is mixed with good, the destructive with the constructive, losses with gains. I am speaking of the importance of revolutions as a factor in history and wondering whether we do not overrate it. I suppose that their chief contribution lies in the release they give to forces in society that have been withheld or restrained-though not all is for the good when the safety valve is blown off. We historians attach much significance to the Puritan Revolution in England, the Revolution of i688, the French, the American, the Russian revolutions-many books, whole libraries, have been written about them. Yet I wonder whether there are not quieter, underlying movements, that attract less spectacular notice-the movements of peoples, the internal movements of population-which are more fundamental and achieve more durable results in the history of mankind. We in the twentieth century lie under the sinister shadow of the Russian Revolution: we are not likely to underestimate it. Yet it may well be that before long we shall come to think of the Russian colonization of Siberia, her expansion into the vast spaces of Northern Asia, as a matter of more solid and insurmountable importance for the world. The fact is that people's attention is arrested by the drama of the revolutionary break in society: they are rather mesmerized by the cross section that is revealed and are apt not to grasp the long process in which revolution is a jolt, a disturbance, sometimes hurrying things up, sometimes obstructing or deflecting the current.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.