Note 811 — Chapter XII · THE STATE (C) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

Simultaneously, too, the Roman Catholic Church quietly changed the basis of its politics from a class to a party, and did so with a strategic sureness that cannot be too much admired. In the eighteenth century it had been, as regards the style of its diplomacy, the allocation of its offices and the spirit of its higher circles, aristocratic through and through. Think of the type of the abbé, and of the prince-prelates who became ministers and ambassadors, like the young Cardinal Rohan. Now, in the true liberal fashion, opinions took the place of origins, working-power that of taste, and the great weapons of democracy—press, elections, money—were handled with a skill that liberalism proper rarely equalled and never surpassed.