i8 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to be ardent advocates of political freedom, rejoice in these acts which 

 shackle and gag their antngonists. But I will take, instead, a case 

 more nearly allied to our own. 



For less strikingly, and in other ways, but still with sufficient 

 clearness, this same truth is displayed in the United States. I do not 

 refer only to such extreme illustrations of it as were at one time fur- 

 nished in California ; where, along with that complete political freedom 

 which some suppose to be the sole requisite for social welfare, most 

 men lived in perpetual fear for their lives, while others prided them- 

 selves on the notches which marked, on the hilts of their pistols, the 

 number of men they had killed. Nor will I dwell on the state of so- 

 ciety existing under republican forms in the West, where a white 

 woman is burnt to death for marrying a negro, where secret gangs 

 murder in the night men w r hose conduct they dislike, where mobs stop 

 trains to lynch offending persons contained in them, where the carry- 

 ing of a revolver is a matter of course, where judges are intimidated 

 and the execution of justice often impracticable. I do but name these 

 as extreme instances of the way in which, under institutions that nomi- 

 nally secuie men from oppression, they may be intolerably oppressed 

 unable to utter their opinions and to conduct their private lives as 

 they please. Without going so far we may find in the Eastern States 

 proof enough that the forms of liberty and the reality of liberty are 

 not necessarily commensurate. A state of things under which men 

 administer justice in their own cases, are applauded for so doing, and 

 mostly acquitted if tried, is a state of things which has, in so far, ret- 

 rograded toward a less civilized state ; for one of the cardinal traits 

 of political progress is the gradual disappearance of personal retalia- 

 tion, and the increasing supremacy of a ruling power which settles 

 the differences between individuals and punishes aggressors. And, in 

 proportion as this ruling power is enfeebled, the security of individuals 

 is lessened. That security, lessened in this general way, is lessened in 

 more special ways, we see in the bribery of judges, in the financial 

 frauds by which many are robbed without possibility of remedy, in 

 the corruptness of New York administration, which, taxing so heavily, 

 does so little. And, under another aspect, we see the like in the do- 

 ings of legislative bodies in the unfair advantages which some indi- 

 viduals gain over others by " lobbying " in Credit-Mobilier briberies, 

 and the like. While the outside form of free government remains, 

 there has grown up within it a reality which makes government not 

 free. The body of professional politicians, entering public life to get 

 incomes, organizing their forces, and developing their tactics, have, 

 in fact, come to be a ruling class quite different from that which the 

 Constitution intended to secure ; and a class having interests by no 

 means identical with public "interests. The worship of the appliances 

 to liberty, in place of liberty itself, needs continually exposing. There 

 is no intrinsic virtue in votes. The possession of representatives is* 



