Note 135 — Chapter V

Mounier himself was just as little able as the most violent revolutionists, who were soon to appear, to conceive the idea of rights derived from the past; of political usages and customs which are in reality laws, though unwritten, and only to be touched with caution, of interests to be respected and very gradually modified without causing a rupture between that which has been and that which is to be—the idea, in short, which is the first principle of practical and regular political liberty. See Mounier’s ‘Nouvelles Observations sur les États-Généraux.’