industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye _De l’avenir des peuples catholiques_.) [Sidenote: Protestantism favours self-government.] Similarly in civil and political matters, Protestants have always been partisans of self-government, of liberty, of local autonomy, and of decentralization. Side by side with the advance of the Reformation in Switzerland, in Holland, in England and America there went a dissemination of the principles of liberty which later became the articles of faith of the French Revolution. Calvinists, notably, have always been inclined to an ideal of liberty and equality which has rightfully rendered them objects of suspicion to the French monarchy; they realized this ideal only beyond the seas in the American Constitution, which may be regarded, in some sort, as the product of Calvinistic ideas. As early as the year 1633 an American, Roger Williams, proclaimed universal liberty, and liberty of conscience in particular; he proclaimed the complete equality of all modes of religious worship before the law, and on these principles founded the democracy of Rhode Island and the town of Providence. The United States, with the local autonomy and decentralization which characterize its government, still forms the type of the Protestant state. In such a state the widest liberty exists only, to say the truth, within the limit of Christianity: the founders of the American Constitution scarcely foresaw the day when a wider tolerance would be necessary. And it would be to form an extremely false idea of the United States to imagine that the civil power and religion are wholly disassociated. The separation between Church and state is far from being as absolute in America as is often supposed, and M. Goblet d’Alviella very justly corrects the too enthusiastic assertions, on this point, of M. Guizot and M. de Laveleye.[79]