204 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



and theoretical equality may, under conditions -which impel the change, 

 most readily become a despotism. For there, the despotism advances 

 in the name and with the might of the people. The single source of 

 power once secured, everything is secured. There is no unfranchised 

 class to whom appeal may be made, no privileged orders who in de- 

 fending their own rights may defend those of all. No bulwark remains 

 to stay the flood, no eminence to rise above it. They were belted 

 barons, led by a mitred archbishop, who curbed the Plantagenet with 

 Magna Charta ; it was the middle classes who broke the pride of the 

 Stuarts; but a mere aristocracy of wealth will never struggle while it 

 can hope to bribe a tyrant. 



And when the disparity of condition increases, so does universal suf- 

 frage make it easy to seize the source of power, for the greater is the 

 projoortion of power in the hands of those who feel no direct interest in 

 the conduct of government; who tortured by want, and embruitcd by 

 poverty, are ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder, or follow the 

 lead of the most blatant demagogue; or who, made bitter by hardships, 

 may even look upon profligate and tyrannous government with the sat- 

 isfaction we may imagine the proletarians and slaves of Rome to have 

 felt, as they ^avv a Caligula or Nero raging among the rich patricians. 

 Given a community with republican institutions, in which one class is 

 too rich to be shorn of their luxuries, no matter how public aflairs are 

 administered, and another so poor that a few dollars on election day 

 will seem more than any abstract consideration ; in which the few roll 

 in wealth, and the many seethe with discontent at a condition of tilings 

 they know not how to remedy, and power must pass into tlie hands of 

 jobbers who will buy and sell it as the Praetorians sold the Roman pur- 

 ple, or into the hands of demagogues, who will seize and wield it for a 

 time only to be displaced by w^orse demagogues. 



Where there is anything like an equal distribution of wealth — that is 

 to say, where there is general patriotism, virtue, and intelligence — the 

 more democratic the government, the better it will be; but where tliere 

 is gross inequality in the distribution of wealth, the more democratic 

 the government, the worse it will be ; for while rotten democracy may 

 not in itself be worse than rotten autocracy, its efi'ects upon national 

 character will be worse. To give the sufl'rage to tramps, to paupers, to 

 men to whom the chance to labor is a boon, to men who must beg, or 

 steal, or starve, is to invoke destruction. To put political power in tlie 

 hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty, is to tie firebrands to 

 foxes, and turn them loose amid the standing corn ; it is to put out the 

 eyes of a Samson, and to twine his arms around the pillars of national 

 life. 



Even the accidents of hereditary succession, or of selection by lot 

 (the plan of some of the ancient republics,) may sometimes place the 

 wise and just in power; but in a corrupt democracy the tendency is 



