49 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



benevolences and taxes, it is none the less despotism because the 

 crime is done in the name of the people. Nor is it any the less a 

 fit object of execration because it does not bear the title of Csesar 



or the Council of Ten. 



I. 



That democracy should be thought the protector of freedom 

 and property is natural. Despite the dense clouds of cant and 

 metaphysics that have enveloped it, the idea has a historic basis. 

 The growth of civilization has been largely an abatement of the 

 monopoly and amount of political control. Human society did 

 not begin, to use the phrase of Hobbes, " with the desolate freedom 

 of the wild ass." Morgan and Maine have made it a common- 

 place of science that there was never a time when the members of 

 the primitive group had the rights and immunities conferred only 

 upon those possessed of the power of moral control. " Mankind," 

 says Prof. Burgess, confirming the truth of a social philosophy he 

 rejects, " does not begin with liberty. Mankind acquires liberty 

 through civilization." * It is first subjected to a double dominion 

 that of custom and that of the leader become autocrat through 

 the fortunes of war. To him belong the person and property of 

 his subjects, to be used as whim or interest may direct. " Kings," 

 said Louis XIV, expounding the doctrine of autocratic despotism, 

 " are absolute lords, naturally possessing the entire and uncon- 

 trolled disposal of all property, whether belonging to the church 

 or to the laity, to be exercised at all times with due regard to 

 economy and to the general interests of the state." f The political 

 philosophy of English autocracy was the same. " As the father 

 over one family," said Sir Robert Filmer, the apologist for the 

 despotism of Charles I, " so the king, as the father over many 

 families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and 

 defend the whole commonwealth. His war, his peace, his courts 

 of justice, and all his acts of sovereignty tend only to preserve 

 and distribute to every subordinate and inferior father and to 

 their children their rights and privileges, so that all the duties 

 of a king are summed up in an universal fatherly care of his 

 people." I 



Here is the point of departure in the long and desperate strug- 

 gle against political control a struggle that occupies the greater 

 part of the history of civilization. If autocratic despotism has 

 not, as in the East, deprived men of the desire to live their 

 lives in their own way and to profit from their own skill and 



* Political Science and Constitutional Law, vol. i, p. 88. 



j- Works of Louis XIV, quoted by Say. Political Economy, third American edition, 

 Philadelphia, 1827, p. 411. 



\ Two Treatises on Civil Government, by John Locke, preceded by Sir Robert Fil- 

 mer's Patriarcha, p. 21. 



