DEMOCRACY

INAUGURAL ADDRESS ON ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY OF THE

BIRMINGHAM AND MIDLAND INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM,

ENGLAND, 6 OCTOBER, 1884

Copyright, 1886. by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into

the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel

which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a

confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe

into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very

condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where

all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish

realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a

singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified

residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves

to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is

justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it.

And in a world of daily--nay, almost hourly--journalism, where every

clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else

thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at

the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on

what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every

inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a

spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted

staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new

tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming

so long. In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that,

if all the words of the dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then

all those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that made tolerable

sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some

poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But,

alas! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited

profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of

topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said over

again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt to think that

observation has on most points of general applicability said its last

word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from it

will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of speculation.

Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add

to the general confusion of tongues? There is something disheartening,

too, in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of

time, as if the mind were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set

on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty

minutes with decorous exactitude. I recollect being once told by the

late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first

lecture as professor (at Zürich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his

ability to occupy the prescribed three quarters of an hour. He was

speaking without notes, and glancing anxiously from time to time at the

watch that lay before him on the desk. "When I had spoken a half hour,"

he said, "I had told them everything I knew in the world, everything!

Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, "and I have done

nothing else ever since." Beneath the humorous exaggeration of the story

I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet

if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his audience

would feel defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by the

example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines increases as

the area of their land in vineyards is diminished.

To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year

has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this

place, where so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my

quality of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from

dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to

me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of

comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few

somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning which I had some

experimental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes and ears as

Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such report as I had been

able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself

was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life and polity

which are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation, under

the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a conservative

turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers

saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change

(to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The

testimony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I have grown to

manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system of

government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some

would call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a

glacier, have been an ear-witness to the forebodings of wise and good and

timid men, and have lived to see those forebodings belied by the course

of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the

reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman

say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification for

suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State of

Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private estate alike at

the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd

years later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her

sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while

suffering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain

the unity and self-respect of the nation.

If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it

certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it

were untrained to its use. There the election of a majority of the

trustees of the public money is controlled by the most ignorant and

vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad, wholly

unpractised in self-government and incapable of assimilation by American

habits and methods. But the finances of our towns, where the native

tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled

in a public assembly of the people, have been in general honestly and

prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of

the voters live by their daily wages, it is not so often the recklessness

as the moderation of public expenditure that surprises an old-fashioned

observer. "The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial

Wisdom. "Why, in the name of all former experience, doesn't he ride to

the Devil?" Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar

and became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last

thing we need be anxious about is property. It always has friends or the

means of making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their owner,

they have wings also to escape danger.

I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your

storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we

are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we

can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser

use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which

some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not

attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them? But bad weather

is not the worst thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, not

long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how unwise it is to draw an

indictment against a whole people, has charged us with the responsibility

of whatever he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his

countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go

into the box and tell us what those morals and manners were before our

example corrupted them! But I confess that I find little to interest and

less to edify me in these international bandyings of "You're another."

I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of

offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that

really includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World

with what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of Democracy. It

is generally people who are in what are called easy circumstances who can

afford the leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these

experience an immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous

Greek name to abuse it by. There is something consolatory also,

something flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to that

conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy

consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking ourselves victims of a

malady by which no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they find

it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading whatever they find

offensive to their nerves, their tastes, their interests, or what they

suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as

physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross-grained fellows

lay their ill-temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment,

and, if it be, is America answerable for it? Even if she were, would it

account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad harvests,

and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other

discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that

go in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy in America

cited as the source and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite

as little connected with it by any sequence of cause and effect. Surely

this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for centuries, and we

are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the

newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he

has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more noticeable on the

surface than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of silence and

suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo Navagero, speaking of the

Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are five

sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of

these last no account is made, _because they have no voice in the Diet_."

[1]

Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doctrines had

their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many

centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it.

Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops, and of the theory

that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself

the first organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man

was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of leaven that

sets the gases at work was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even

in that, far-sighted persons like the Emperor Charles V. saw the germ of

political and social revolution. Now that the chief end of man seems to

have become the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as

possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and social. But

there had also been social upheavals before the Reformation and

contemporaneously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. The

Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing.

Formerly the immense majority of men--our brothers--knew only their

sufferings, their wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to

know their opportunity and their power. All persons who see deeper than

their plates are rather inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it,

for the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which Dives has no

antidote.

There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and prosperous

Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the

aspirations and political theories of men in the Old World who do not

find things to their mind; but, whether for good or evil, it should not

be overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the

British oak. Every successive swarm that has gone out from this

_officina gentium_ has, when left to its own instincts--may I not call

them hereditary instincts?--assumed a more or less thoroughly democratic

form. This would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that the

British Constitution, under whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is

essentially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with

democratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with conservative

instincts. People are continually saying that America is in the air, and

I am glad to think it is, since this means only that a clearer conception

of human claims and human duties is beginning to be prevalent. The

discontent with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the

atmosphere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus,

seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door

of America. I say wherever the conditions were favorable, for it is

certain that the germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous field

for their development and noxious activity unless where the simplest

sanitary precautions have been neglected. "For this effect defective

comes by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of

the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent

and dangerous. It is then only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It

is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts

of intelligence:--

"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain,

Slaves by their own compulsion."

Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much

heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the

guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and

secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain

sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither.

It is only when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand

the unreasonable and impracticable: only when the possible is made

difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are

made out of the dreams of the poor. No; the sentiment which lies at the

root of democracy is nothing new. I am speaking always of a sentiment, a

spirit, and not of a form of government; for this was but the outgrowth

of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression

of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a controlling

hand, in the management of their own affairs. What is new is that they

are more and more gaining that control, and learning more and more how to

be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift--what we are

being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things--has for some

time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in

arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east

wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent

will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some

people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are

conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a

metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive

one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what nurses

and other experienced persons call growing-pains, and need not seriously

alarm us. They are what every generation before us--certainly every

generation since the invention of printing--has gone through with more or

less good fortune. To the door of every generation there comes a

knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor and his

wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder.

It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of

the cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. "Who's there,

in the name of Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in

our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have

not opposed it,--have not prophesied with the alderman that the world

would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on

the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes

about its business as if nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave

trade, abolition of slavery, trade unions,--at all of these excellent

people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured "Ichabod." But the

trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all read

their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are learning the

business of citizenship and the difficulties of practical legislation.

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against

the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world

was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most

tenacious, race that had ever lived in it--the race to whom we owed our

religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in

all literature--a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary

as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the

bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable

impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had their revenge, as

the wronged are always sure to have it sooner or later. They made their

corner the counter and banking-house of the world, and thence they rule

it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfathers mobbed

Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the

headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that

this is an age of transition, as if that made matters clearer; but can

any one point us to an age that was not? If he could, he would show us

an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before

us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points

are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we should

remember that nothing is more natural for people whose education has been

neglected than to spell evolution with an initial "r." A great man

struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime spectacle;

but surely a great man wrestling with these new forces that have come

into the world, mastering them and controlling them to beneficent ends,

would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it

would be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for ambition. I

have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing

itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and

consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of

mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of

life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct--to

endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the

real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself

generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most

inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the

powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this

inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it.

Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really

is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain

thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill

darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely

to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must

stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there

is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

President Lincoln defined democracy to be "the government of the people

by the people for the people." This is a sufficiently compact statement

of it as a political arrangement. Theodore Parker said that "Democracy

meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.'" And

this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement of the

other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would

easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social

economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the

beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for

answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that

ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true

gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the

likeness between them. A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian

poet Jellaladeen tells us that "One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a

voice asked from within 'Who is there?' and he answered 'It is I.' Then

the voice said, 'This house will not hold me and thee;' and the door was

not opened. Then went the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in

solitude, and after a year he returned and knocked again at the door; and

again the voice asked 'Who is there?' and he said 'It is thyself;' and

the door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, and

this is an only too practical world. I grant it; but I am one of those

who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it

rests on the ideal. It used to be thought that a democracy was possible

only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy

strictly defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly upon every

question of public concern in a general assembly. An example still

survives in the tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this immediate

intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of the essence of

democracy; it is not necessary, nor indeed, in most cases, practicable.

Democracies to which Mr. Lincoln's definition would fairly enough apply

have existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme authority

reside in the people, yet they can act only indirectly on the national

policy. This generation has seen a democracy with an imperial

figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body politic has never

embraced all the inhabitants included within its territory, the right to

share in the direction of affairs has been confined to citizens, and

citizenship has been further restricted by various limitations, sometimes

of property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and sex.

The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or

intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though,

as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they

elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been

generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of

theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better

than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not

seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be

ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of

ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of

time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and

experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of

tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability.

They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race,

and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed.

The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or

fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn.

This was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men

of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English

principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and

they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as

they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their

whim. With few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of the then

accepted syllogism,--democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was

framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their

narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable

fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was reverberated from

house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every

impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular

assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a

mob, all the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of

law.[2]

Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for

a widely scattered population and for States already practised in the

discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity

and enormous advantages. The material they had to work upon was already

democratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by

more than a century's schooling in self-government. They had but to give

permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and

direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with

checks and balances, they had a great help and safeguard in their federal

organization. The different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social

systems of the several States made existence as a Union and coalescence

into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and

compromise. The very elements of disintegration were the best guides in

political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only

too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental

morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that

compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary

expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in

statesmanship.

Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole,

successful? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears

of its proving contagious? This trial would have been less severe could

it have been made with a people homogeneous in race, language, and

traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and

assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all

these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say

that the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. The previous

condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in

New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a

Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, "Thin I'm

agin it!" We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the

most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens,

who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of a

country and of institutions which they know to be worth dying for. The

exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these

hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the

social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf

in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are

buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive

again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them

profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them.

To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them

so), and that out of materials the most discordant,--I might say the most

recalcitrant,--argues a certain beneficent virtue in the system that

could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck.

Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day

for everybody. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their

bellies. As for the security of property, it should be tolerably well

secured in a country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though

the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that add to

the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest

the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the

smallest in its division? In point of fact, far-seeing men count the

increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of the chief

dangers with which the institutions of the United States are threatened

in the not distant future. The right of individual property is no doubt

the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a

little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional

consideration because it bears all the burdens of the State. It bears

those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with its

person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should

not forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then.

Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can,

and rate as highly, the value of wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the

security of refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and

beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an

ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which

has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue

which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criticise any

form of government. All have their virtues, all their defects, and all

have illustrated one period or another in the history of the race, with

signal services to humanity and culture. There is not one that could

stand a cynical cross-examination by an experienced criminal lawyer,

except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the

world has never seen, except in that white-haired king of Browning's who

"Lived long ago

In the morning of the world,

When Earth was nearer Heaven than now."

The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have

at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very

safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the

country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push

of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called

government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while

before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand,

too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit

at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading

journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and

responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of

government by a majority of voices? To a person who in the last century

would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a numerical

preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth

as could well be devised, but experience has apparently shown it to be a

convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable

or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different

face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were

agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason,

perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at

the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but

that she is far better-looking than he had imagined.

The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswerable.

"What," we exclaim, "shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as much weight in

the scale as I?" Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet

universal suffrage has not been the instrument of greater unwisdom than

contrivances of a more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned

composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have

sometimes shown traces of human passion or prejudice in their votes.

Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the

business of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in trying a less

costly method? The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are

likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to

vote makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the best way of

teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For

the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man

the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive

whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is

cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that

the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of

wrong in their heads. At any rate this is the dilemma to which the drift

of opinion has been for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma

is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns than a wolf by the

ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is not valued when it is

indiscriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I

have observed that what men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that

of chief mourner at a funeral. But is there not danger that it will be

valued at more than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate way

will be sought to make up for the want of it? Men who have a voice in

public affairs are at once affiliated with one or other of the great

parties between which society is divided, merge their individual hopes

and opinions in its safer, because more generalized, hopes and opinions,

are disciplined by its tactics, and acquire, to a certain degree, the

orderly qualities of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to a

body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, under

whatever method of helping things to go wrong man's wit can contrive,

those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the

end, and that the highest privilege to which the majority of mankind can

aspire is that of being governed by those wiser than they. Universal

suffrage has in the United States sometimes been made the instrument of

inconsiderate changes, under the notion of reform, and this from a

misconception of the true meaning of popular government. One of these

has been the substitution in many of the States of popular election for

official selection in the choice of judges. The same system applied to

military officers was the source of much evil during our civil war, and,

I believe, had to be abandoned. But it has been also true that on all

great questions of national policy a reserve of prudence and discretion

has been brought out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor of

a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been

known to fail in the long run. It is, perhaps, true that, by effacing

the principle of passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has

slackened the spring of that ductility to discipline which is essential

to "the unity and married calm of States." But I feel assured that

experience and necessity will cure this evil, as they have shown their

power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have evils ever

been remedied till they became intolerable, and shook men out of their

indolent indifference through their fears?

We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the

foundations of personal independence, to weaken the principle of

authority, to lessen the respect due to eminence, whether in station,

virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could not hold

together. Perhaps the best forcing-house of robust individuality would

be where public opinion is inclined to be most overbearing, as he must be

of heroic temper who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the

season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of the symptoms of the

time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, but

this is due partly to the fact that state-craft is no longer looked upon

as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition,

by which I mean the habit of respecting what we are told to respect

rather than what is respectable in itself. There is more rough and

tumble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to people

of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their

political duties lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither

unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies can no more jump

away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no doubt

sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. But

they do this because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be

true that the idol is the measure of the worshipper, yet the worship has

in it the germ of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that

fall into these errors? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue

to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the

saviour of society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or

leanings, am not ready to think so. But democracies have likewise their

finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant

speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and ungainly manners, of

little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more absolute

in power than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his

countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom, his sincerity, his faith in God

and man, and the nobly humane simplicity of his character. And I

remember another whom popular respect enveloped as with a halo, the least

vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most independent of

opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere

neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament and decoration.

Institutions which could bear and breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson

had surely some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless turmoil and

miscarriage of the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of

favorable omen, one thing to make optimism distrust its own obscure

distrust, it is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and

more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone of political and social

institutions is their ability to supply them with worthy objects of this

sentiment, which is the very tap-root of civilization and progress.

There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it with the elements of

growth and vigor than such an organization of society as will enable men

to respect themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others.

Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an

avowedly democratical Constitution. For I take it that the real essence

of democracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon when he said

that the French Revolution meant "la carrière ouverte aux talents"--a

clear pathway for merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to

paraphrase this by calling democracy that form of society, no matter what

its political classification, in which every man had a chance and knew

that he had it. If a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to

climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which he is fitted, he

can well afford to be indifferent what name is given to the government

under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous

tribune of that name, wrote in 1771: "The English are, in my opinion, a

hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines

themselves, because they do not know and will not know till the

destruction of their over-swollen power, which I believe very near,

whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, and wish to play

the part of all three."

England has not been obliging enough to fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and

perhaps it was this very carelessness about the name, and concern about

the substance of popular government, this skill in getting the best out

of things as they are, in utilizing all the motives which influence men,

and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal

factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an

unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of

their own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and

circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have made. All

free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by

public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that

their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify

the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of

democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere

may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious

levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing.

Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air.

Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate

your future rulers. But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard? To

educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires and

wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must

go deeper and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in

so far as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the

existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly understood, is

a conservative force), but the Socialism, which may find a fulcrum in it.

If we cannot equalize conditions and fortunes any more than we can

equalize the brains of men--and a very sagacious person has said that

"where two men ride of a horse one must ride behind"--we can yet,

perhaps, do something to correct those methods and influences that lead

to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. It

is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in his

political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because

the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said?

_A fortiori_, we might on the same principle insist on a division of

human wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even

more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequitably large

share of it. But he is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am

convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most

important part, of political economy; and in thinking man to be of more

concern and more convincing than the longest columns of figures in the

world. For unless you include human nature in your addition, your total

is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism

means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, coöperation and

community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a

share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth

they must combine to produce--means, in short, the practical application

of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and

benign reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in

personal character--self-help, forethought, and frugality--which nourish

and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous Commonwealth.

I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in

possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of

society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which

they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us

say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that

they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should

look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual

man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the

evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that

you must

"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought,

thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time

in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds

hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It

is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it

renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows

of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative

merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the

small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to

discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted these

are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem,

and which it has always believed, to be the most innocent and healthful.

The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute

them in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering

that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The

world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have

contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its

constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has

tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as

brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in

monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the

still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting

us to a wider and wiser humanity.

[1] Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still another even

more helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The same witness informs

us that of the extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as

much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and

Burghers together. Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their

own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had

no voice, ("Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti." Serie I., tomo i., pp.

378, 379, 389.)

[2] The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping of

emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of

Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned

with.