Collections and Recollections

Collections and Recollections is a memoir written by George William Erskine Russell. Russell was a British biographer, memoirist and Liberal political figure. Excerpt: «I now approach the political condition at the turn of the century, and that was to a great extent the product of the French Revolution. Some historians, indeed, when dealing with that inexhaustible theme, have wrought cause and effect into a circular chain, and have reckoned among the circumstances which prepared the way for the French Revolution the fact that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty. That these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire's mordant genius and matchless style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French society, is indeed likely enough. But to pursue the theme would carry us too far back into the eighteenth century. In dealing with the recollections of persons whom one's self has known we must dismiss from view the causes of the French Revolution. Our business is with its effect on political thought and action in England.»