THE DESPOTISM OF DEMOCRACY. 



501 



fluctuations of policy, delays, perjuries, negligencies, and other 

 miscarriages of justice; officers of the law double-faced and mer- 

 cenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypo- 

 critical and truckling, and officeholders unfaithful to pledges and 

 to reasonable public expectation." * 



" But," urges some philanthropic statesman, enamored of 

 quackery for social and political ills, "is it not possible to frame 

 laws with sufficient skill and to get them enforced with sufficient 

 vigor to hasten human progress ? Too intolerable altogether is it 

 to await the slow pace of evolution." Intolerable though it be, it 

 is far less so than the remedy urged, which was foredoomed from 

 the first to inevitable disaster. It is a flagrant violation of the 

 law of social and physical growth. The union of merit with 

 benefit is as vital as the union of breath with life. The sever- 

 ance of the one is punished with the same certainty and severity 

 as the severance of the other. Men must not be deprived of the 

 fruits of their talents and toil ; they must not be allowed to 

 escape the penalties attached to ignorance and indolence. Pro- 

 tection against this law was. the inherent and destructive vice of 

 the rule of the one and of the few ; it is the vice also of the rule 

 of the many. "When despotism," says Boudrillart, catching a 

 glimpse of this truth, "becomes the regime of a nation, is it not 

 its fatal law to revive favors and privileges, and to destroy equal- 

 ity for the benefit of the low and unworthy ?"f As if fresh 

 from the study of the national, State, and municipal govern- 

 ments of the United States, Maine replies in the affirmative. 

 "When the ingenious legislator," he says, "had counted on pro- 

 ducing a nation of self-denying and somewhat sentimental pa- 

 triots, he finds that he has created a people of Jacobins or a 

 people of slaves." X Necessarily is it so. Self-interest, enlisted in 

 behalf of the prostitution of public affairs, as must be the case 

 under every form of despotism, can produce nothing but ineffi- 

 ciency and corruption. A powerful bureaucracy can only destroy 

 the independence of a people and render them unfit to care for 

 themselves. If they have not wholly lost spirit, any failure to 

 give them relief from the woes they have been taught to charge 

 to the government is certain to turn them into rioters and revo- 

 lutionists. It did so in Greece and Rome ; it did so in the Italian 

 republics ; it will do so in their modern successors. 



Of the many " problems of democracy " that now vex the vic- 

 tims of social and political speculation, there is one at least that 

 admits of solution. It is the utter unfitness of any class of people 

 to exercise special dominion, even though they be " leading citi- 



* Atlantic Monthly, February, 189Y, pp. 179, 180. 



\ Block. Dictionnaire de la Politique, vol. i, p. 641. \ Popular Government, p. 176. 



