THE DESPOTISM OF DEMOCRACY, 493 



mincing the matter," says Mr. W. E. Forster : " nnless the world 

 goes back, democracy must go forward." * " The democratic prin- 

 ciple," says Maine, regarding it as a militant power like some 

 barbarian horde, " has gone forth conquering and to conquer, and 

 its gainsayers are few and feeble." f " To attempt to arrest the 

 progress of democracy," says De Tocqueville, in the same melan- 

 choly vein, " seems like opposition to God, and it remains for the 

 nations of the earth to adjust themselves to the conditions imposed 

 by Providence." X But when viewed in the light of the far-reach- 

 ing and hopeful inductions of Herbert Spencer, democracy, to 

 many minds so fraught with peril to civilization, is divested of 

 terror. They show not only why it is honored with the vast 

 moral, intellectual, and material achievements of the last four 

 centuries, but they show also why it is charged with the intoler- 

 able social and political evils that have blackened and still blacken 

 the pages of history. By the operation of the law of evolution, 

 as immutable as any law of Nature, the agencies of human effort, 

 whatever be their purpose, have been enlarged almost to an infi- 

 nite degree, and made immeasurably more perfect and useful. 

 By the operation of another law, equally immutable, has been 

 decreed the character of those agencies ; it has determined whether 

 the beliefs, institutions, and morals of a nation shall be those of 

 savages or those of civilized men those of war or those of peace. 

 Subjected to the solvent power of these inductions, all the 

 phenomena of social life yield their secrets. They disclose the 

 truth that feudalism, from which modern society took its origin, 

 was not due to soil, nor climate, nor race; it sprang from the 

 murder and pillage of mediaeval barbarism. Of the same remorse- 

 less Fury were born its machinery of despotism and its hideous 

 traits. She was the mother of the hatred, cruelty, greed, and 

 lust that afflicted the world for a thousand years and still afflict 

 it. Industry, however, has been the mother of peace, liberty, 

 honesty, and virtue. Without security and freedom, traffic in 

 labor and its fruits is impossible. Men must be protected from 

 robbery ; they must own themselves as well as their toil ; they 

 must have the right to exchange; they must be exempt from 

 seizure and confiscation. Nor can traffic thrive without the 

 benignant spirit of kindness and courtesy. It demands an effort 

 to please, and the effort to please begets the habit of pleasing. It 

 demands honesty and confidence, the basis of credit and a potent 

 stimulus to enterprise. But traffic is a ship freighted with 

 wealth, which gives leisure and permits the culture of the noble 



* Address as Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen. Quoted by May, Democracy 

 in Europe, vol. i, introduction, p. 29. 



j- Popular Government, p. 5. \ Democratic en Am^rique, introduction, p. 6. 



