5 oo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



IV. 



" The really alarming feature connected with the growth of 

 democracy," says Mr. Godkin, apparently astonished at this natu- 

 ral and inevitable abuse of power, " is that it does not seem to 

 make adequate provision for the government of this new world 

 [of modern industry]. Its chief function, like the chief function 

 of the monarchy which it has succeeded," he adds, showing an un- 

 conscious recognition of the cause of the evil, " is to fill offices." * 

 But what other form of despotism has ever made adequate pro- 

 vision for anything beyond the preservation of order and the pre- 

 vention of aggression ? Has not the government of the one tried 

 it and failed? Has not the government of the few tried it and 

 failed ? Let the moral, intellectual, and industrial history of every 

 country on the face of the earth answer. For centuries despotism, 

 either autocratic or aristocratic, strove in the interest of self-pres- 

 ervation to regulate the beliefs of men. Even the portly volumes 

 of Dr. White on The Warfare of Science scarcely suffice to record 

 its incalculable harm. It made cowards, hypocrites, and martyrs. 

 It drove virtuous and industrious populations from their homes, 

 crippling forever Protestant France and the Spanish Netherlands. 

 Never has it laid its fingers on any enterprise, whether its mo- 

 tives be greed or virtue, without blighting it like a plague, and 

 summoning, like an evil spirit, all the malevolence that war has 

 planted in the human heart. " The first inevitable consequence 

 was," says Buckle, recounting its attempts to regulate trade, 

 "that in every part of Europe there sprang into existence nu- 

 merous and powerful gangs of smugglers, who lived by disobey- 

 ing the laws which their ignorant rulers had imposed. These 

 men, desperate from the fear of punishment, and accustomed to 

 the commission of every crime, contaminated the surrounding 

 population ; introduced into peaceful villages vices formerly un- 

 known ; caused the ruin of entire families ; spread, wherever they 

 came, drunkenness, theft, and dissoluteness ; and familiarized 

 their associates with those coarse and swinish bebaucheries which 

 were the natural habits of so vagrant and lawless a life." \ Most 

 significantly does he add that with the abolition of the laws van- 

 ished the crimes and the criminals they had created. But the 

 despotism of democracy has yielded no better fruit. " The public 

 have seen law defied," says President Charles W. Eliot, describ- 

 ing the attempts to control the American liquor traffic in the 

 interest of virtue ; " a whole generation of habitual lawbreakers, 

 schooled in evasion and shamelessness ; courts ineffective through 



* Democratic Tendencies. Atlantic Monthly, February, 1897, p. 159. 

 f History of Civilization, vol. i, pp. 278, 279. 



