224 The Morality of Nature 



is necessary for the purpose of organization; and evidently 

 ignores or annuls all question of right by superiority, 

 whether of individual wisdom or of divine inspiration, or of 

 inherited function. It transfers not right but only power, 

 and leaves the right in the people irremovable. 



This is seen to be a process in harmony with that pre- 

 vious observation of altruistic culture, which indicated that 

 control or government cannot successfully compel active 

 virtues, but can only forbid aggressions. In this effort gov- 

 ernment represents, not the responsible individual desiring 

 a leader, or teacher, to control or direct his conduct ; but it 

 represents the aggregate of his neighbors; whose wishes he 

 must tolerate in order to secure their consent, and who thus 

 express to him their wishes. He, the individual governed, 

 still enjoys liberty, and choice of his own conduct, for his 

 own benefit, except so far as it is agreed that his neighbors' 

 rights are to limit them through governmental restraint. 



Thus the function of true or altruistic democracy differs 

 greatly from that of a society in which the individual trans- 

 fers his liberties and rights to a common fund of activities, 

 and looks to a paternal government not only for restraint 

 from wrong but for direction in right action. This theory, 

 even if put into practice in an elective form of government, 

 would still encourage, or at least permit, the supposition that 

 something wiser than the abstract popular wisdom forms the 

 basis of authority; and would admit of a vacant place in 

 the structure which divine or inspired wisdom, and there- 

 fore authority, would properly fill. Or in case it merely 

 theorized the transfer of the collective wisdom to an elective 

 government of limited power; it would, in its assumption of 



