Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose. The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in France effective and complete.
Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban. Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words. The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal, and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of the world outside the British Empire and the United States.
This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences, for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system or the _Code Napoléon_. But, for all its complexities, the English government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after 1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts had been.
Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute. Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable comedy, _The Inspector-General_, deals as certainly with uniformities as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than anything the old regime could show for a similar period.
These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy, civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus of popular government lies rather within that vague and important field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in politics was another and less exalted matter.
These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English, French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the political life of the society.
In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans, business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to be a very good ruling class.
The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern. Lands confiscated from clergy and _émigré_ nobles were acquired by revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants, and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class _after_ the revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of land and trade, as did the English.
In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end of struggle over economic goods or power--but you may put the Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’ goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call “property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’ goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and other elements favoring collective farming over the _kulaks_, and of almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions out of a hat--nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book as _Das Kapital_.