AN APOSTATE DEMOCRACY. 673 



be that in the management of certain important enterprises they are 

 so indifferent to the public welfare that State control or ownership is 

 the only escape from their exactions. Hardly a great strike occurs 

 that is not accompanied by excesses that only barbarians would com- 

 mit. When there is no violence, the feeling of hatred on the part 

 of union men toward non-union men takes the form of a persecu- 

 tion more intolerable often than personal assault. Despite primary 

 and ballot reforms and the punishment of bribery, the choice of 

 officials has become more and more the work of a few men, who con- 

 trol caucauses, conventions, and legislatures, and use their immense 

 power to blackmail individuals and corporations to enrich them- 

 selves or to advance their political fortunes. As to the grosser 

 forms of crime, the multitude of laws passed to check it has proved 

 equally impotent. Of the prevalence of hoodlumism, even in New 

 England, the home of the Puritan, Prof. Charles Eliot Norton has 

 testified in words of astonishment and alarm. Speaking of the 

 murders throughout the country, Dr. Andrew D. "White has stated 

 in a public lecture that they number more than ten thousand a year, 

 and are increasing at a frightful rate. Lynch law is no longer con- 

 fined to the South, so terribly ravaged by the civil war, nor executed 

 upon negroes alone, nor prescribed only for assaults upon women; 

 it has extended to the North and the West; whites are included 

 among its victims, and robbery or murder suffices to invoke its appli- 

 cation. 



To many social philosophers such phenomena have been as inex- 

 plicable as they have been startling. " Why is it," they ask them- 

 selves, " that the more we strive by laws and ordinances to hasten 

 the dawn of the millennium, the darker the heavens get? Is democ- 

 racy a demon that is not amenable to restraint ? Is it destined to tri- 

 umph over the forces of righteousness, and wreck the very civiliza- 

 tion that brought it forth? ' ; Yet they go on believing that these 

 thousands and tens of thousands of edicts of despotic democracy, 

 which work a moral as well as economic havoc that passes com- 

 putation, are so many novel and valuable experiments in social sci- 

 ence — so many attempts more or less successful to solve its great 

 problems. As though every other despot from time immemorial had 

 not made them before; as though, in civilized communities, where 

 moral control is fast taking the place of political control, they could 

 produce any other effect* than the one so greatly feared! It is not by 

 sowing the wind that the whirlwind is laid. It is not by acts of 

 aggression, no matter how pure their motive or lofty their aim, that 

 the world is bettered. For, gild the deed as we may, every law 

 passed, every office created, every dollar appropriated beyond the 

 preservation of order and the enforcement of justice, the great 



VOL. LII. — 49 



