A. J. P. Taylor’s famous book English History 1914–1945 begins:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. . . . He had no official number or identity card.

This was written in 1965. Exactly forty years later, another Oxford historian, Jose Harris, wrote in her Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870–1914:

Nothing in the sociological theories of the period (or indeed of subsequent periods) quite prepares one for the extraordinary coexistence of extreme social inequality with respect for and observance of the law, of growing public order and defence of civil liberties.

I doubt that anyone will be writing anything similar to either Taylor or Harris in the years 2060 or 2100 about contemporary Britain: that is, if anyone finds contemporary Britain to be of sufficient interest to write anything at all about it. Britain’s happy combination of freedom and order was a civilizational achievement of a high order, but, since men are more apt to think about the problems they see around them than the achievement which they incorrectly take for granted and believe to be irreversible, the work of destruction began almost at once. The achievement, in fact, was to be rather short-lived.

One of the reasons it was so short-lived is that no one took to heart Tocqueville’s famous dictum, that he who seeks in liberty anything