in with, it is in Mr. Mill's hands something quite different
from the same doctrine as preached by the French revolutionary school;
indeed one might even call it reactionary, in respect of the French
theory of a hundred years back. It reposes on no principle of abstract
right, but, like the rest of its author's opinions, on principles of
utility and experience. Dr. Arnold used to divide reformers into two
classes, popular and liberal. The first he defined as seekers of
liberty, the second as seekers of improvement; the first were the goats,
and the second were the sheep. Mr. Mill's doctrine denied the mutual
exclusiveness of the two parts of this classification, for it made
improvement the end and the test, while it proclaimed liberty to be the
means. Every thinker now perceives that the strongest and most durable
influences in every western society lead in the direction of democracy,
and tend with more or less rapidity to throw the control of social
organisation into the hands of numerical majorities. There are many
people who believe that if you only make the ruling body big enough, it
is sure to be either very wise itself, or very eager to choose wise
leaders. Mr. Mill, as any one who is familiar with his writings is well
aware, did not hold this opinion. He had no more partiality for mob rule
than De Maistre or Goethe or Mr. Carlyle. He saw its evils more clearly
than any of these eminent men, because he had a more scientific eye, and
because he had had the invaluable training of a political administrator
on a large scale, and in a very responsible post. But he did not content
himself with seeing these evils, and he wasted no energy in passionate
denunciation of them, which he knew must prove futile. Guizot said of De
Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Mr. Mill
was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De
Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which
the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without
chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started.
Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on
the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted
that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong
man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the
master nor his still angrier and more impatient mimics could ever tell
us.

No