AN APOSTATE DEMOCRACY, 655 



against it. "All . . . will bear in mind this sacred principle," 

 he said, proclaiming a truth more honored in the breach than 

 in the observance, " that though the will of the majority is in all 

 cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that 

 the minority possess their equal rights which equal laws must protect, 

 and to violate which would be oppression." Madison, too, rejected 

 the popular superstition that the government of the majority must 

 be synonymous with wisdom and justice. " Wherever the real power 

 in a government lies," he wrote, " there is danger of oppression. In 

 our government, the real power lies in the government of the major- 

 ity of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly 

 to be apprehended, not from acts of the government contrary to the 

 sense of the constituents, but from acts in which the government is 

 a mere instrument of the major number of constituents. This is a 

 truth of great importance," he added, disclosing a state of the popu- 

 lar mind that the experience of a century has not bettered, " but not 

 sufficiently attended to." As is well known to the students of 

 American history, the Federalists, who now take high rank among 

 the saints of democracy, were even more distrustful of it than 

 Jefferson and Madison. " General Hamilton," says Morris, present- 

 ing that statesman in a light that must make his socialistic wor- 

 shipers feel that they have been burning incense to a false god, 

 " hated republican government because he confronted it with demo- 

 cratical government, and he disliked the latter because he believed 

 that it must end in despotism and be in the meantime destructive to 

 the public morality." * The vehement indictment of bluff old John 

 Adams is worthy of Carlyle himself. " If," he writes, " you give 

 more than a share in the sovereignty to the democrats that is, if 

 you give them the command or preponderance in the sovereignty, 

 that is, the legislature they will vote all the property out of the 

 hands of you aristocrats, and if they let you escape with your lives, 

 it will be more humanity, consideration, and generosity than any 

 triumphant democracy ever displayed since creation." f 



Men possessed of such views of democracy as a political power 

 were not likely to frame a government based upon the deification of 

 the majority. Never having steeped themselves in the mysticism 

 of political romance and speculation, they did not dream that the 

 state could be wiser and more virtuous than the people that com- 

 posed it. ISTor could they think of it as a beneficent power, exhaust- 

 less in expedient and resource, that could, like a fairy, turn their 

 footsteps from every pitfall and, by the wave of a wand, shower upon 

 them all the blessings of existence. What they conceived it to be was 



* Van Buren. Political Parties in the United States, p 80. 

 f Works, vol. vi, p. 516. 



