his
knife the head of the luckless creature doomed to be served for so
unworthy a company." And the voice of Jefferson still speaks in the
land. Obedient to his dictate, Americans still take a sentimental
view of Liberty. For them Liberty is still an emotion to feel, not a
privilege to enjoy. They are willing to believe that a monarch means
slavery. America is the greatest republic on earth, they argue, and
therefore it is the chosen and solitary home of Freedom.

So, ignoring the peculiar enslavements of democracy, forgetting the
temptations to which the noblest republic is exposed, they proclaim a
monopoly of the sovereign virtue, and cast a cold eye of disdain upon
the tradition of older countries. The author of 'Triumphant Democracy,'
for instance, asserts that he "was denied political equality by his
native land." We do not know for what offence he was thus heavily
punished, and it is consoling to reflect that the beloved Republic has
made him "the peer of any man." It has not made any other man his peer.
He is separated far more widely by his wealth from the workmen, whom he
patronises, than the meanest day-labourer in England from the dukes to
whom he is supposed to bend the knee; and if Mr Carnegie's be the
fine flower of American Liberty, we need hardly regret that ours is of
another kind.

In Jefferson's despite, men are not made free and equal by the frequent
repetition of catchwords, and it is by a fine irony that America, which
prides itself upon a modern spirit, should still be swayed by a foolish
superstition, more than a century old, that the cant of Liberty and
Equality, uttered by a slave-owner in 1776, should still warp its
intelligence. "I don't know what liberty means," said Lord Byron, "never
having seen it;" and it was in candour rather than in experience that
Byron differed from his fellows. Nor has any one else seen what eluded
Byron. A perfectly free man must be either uncivilised or decivilised--a
savage stronger than his fellows or an undetected anarch armed with a
bomb, A free society is a plain contradiction, for a society must be
controlled by law, and law is an instant curtailment of Liberty. And,
if you would pursue this chimera, it is not in a democracy that you are
likely to surprise it. Liberty is a prize which will always escape you
in a mob. The supremacy of the people means the absolute rule of the
majority, in deference to which the mere citizen must lay aside all hope
of indep