From One Liberal to Another

Boris, don't get upset if I address you, the sovereign, in such a familiar way. I have my reasons. After all, as regards our ages, you could be my son. I lived in the West, more specifically in England, for almost ninety-two years. Of course, this was long ago, in the seventeenth century. But the period was—let me put it to you bluntly—very satisfying and very instructive, especially for sovereigns. Marxist historians call it the period of the English bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century, claiming to see in these horrendous events the progressive course of universal history, which it is the task of all other nations and states to emulate. In addition, through the medium of those old events, belonging in spirit to the benighted Middle Ages, a new, progressive page of universal history would be begun. Don't believe them, Boris. Before you, you have an eyewitness and living testimony to the events of that period, one who discerned in them "merely injustice and madness of every sort and how they were brought about by their causes—hypocrisy and conceit, the first of which is a double injustice, and the second a double madness."